Amazonia [Film]
Date:
2010
Materials:
High definition double screen projection with quadrophonic sound
Dimensions:
Projection ratio 16:9. Duration 23'40''
Exhibition history:
2026 Jane Lombard Gallery, NYC, USA; 2023 Cuneo, Italy; 2012 Fondation Groupe EDF, Paris, France; PAV Turin, Italy; 2010 Natural History Museum London, UK
Courtesy:
© Lucy + Jorge Orta. Filmed by Jorge Orta and Matt Wrainright. Edited by David Bickerstaff. Poetry written by Mario Petrucci in collaboration with the artists. Commissioned by contemporary art programme at the Natural History Museum London
Amazonia is a double-screen film conceived as a poetic response to a scientific expedition undertaken by Lucy + Jorge Orta to the Amazon rainforest in 2009. The work bears witness to the visible effects of climate change on one of the planet’s most complex and vital ecosystems.
On the eastern edge of the Peruvian Andes, the sun rises over a vast cloud forest stretching 6,000 kilometres toward the Atlantic. As mist lifts from the canopy — often described as the “green lungs” of the Earth — a chorus of insects and howler monkeys signals the awakening of the forest. The soundtrack opens with the voice of Gaia, invoking the interconnected nature of this immense living system:
My centre is everywhere, everything huge and hung together.
The film traces the artists’ journey from the receding glaciers at the source of the Amazon, along the ancient Inca paths of the Trocha Unión destabilised by landslides, through elfin forests to dense rainforest, along glacial streams descending thousands of metres into the Madre de Dios river basin. Throughout, a poetic dialogue unfolds between Gaia, ancestral mother of life, and Progress, the voice of scientific rationality.
The work concludes with a reminder of human agency and responsibility:
Touch the nation any Human
Tug —
At any moment
Our future will move.