Italy: A dramatic audio-visual journey into the heart of the Amazon

Rome: MAXXI takes visitors on a dramatic audio-visual journey into the heart of the Amazon in an exhibition running from 1 October until 13 February.

The celebrated photojournalist Sebastião Salgado provides a black and white photographic journey through the Brazilian Amazon, after he spent seven years capturing images of the forest, the rivers, the mountains and the people who live there.

MAXXI, Italy’s national museum of 21st-century arts, presents Salgado’s 200 photographs against a soundscape of sounds – recorded in the forests and created by Jean-Michel Jarre – feauring the rustling of trees, birdsong, the shrieks of animals, and the roar of waterfalls.

Titled Amazônia, the exhibition highlights the fragility of this ecosystem, showing that in the protected areas where the indigenous communities live the forest has suffered almost no damage.

Speaking at the inauguration in Rome, Salgado said: “This exhibition is the result of seven years of human experience and photographic expeditions carried out by land, water and air.”

Salgado added that “every single person on this planet must play their part” in protecting “this immense heritage, which is in danger of disappearing” due to “destruction and dispossession.”

Describing the Amazon as “the garden of the earth”, MAXXI president Giovanna Melandri said: “While the Youth4Climate and Pre-COP26 meetings are taking place in Milan, through the art and power of Salgado’s images we want to raise a cry of alarm: according to a recent research published in Nature, today due to fires and deforestation, the Amazon rainforest produces more CO2 than it can absorb.”