Manuela Moscoso on the Second Bienal das Amazônias

Terence Trouillot The title of this year’s Bienal das Amazônias is ‘Verde-Distância’ (Distance-Green), inspired by Benedicto Monteiro’s novel Verde vagomundo (1972). What drew you to that book, and how did it shape your curatorial thinking?

Manuela Moscoso The phrase appears early in the novel almost like a spell: ‘verde-sombra, verde-ouro, verde-prata, verde-amanhã, verde-tarde…’ [shadow-green, gold-green, silver-green, tomorrow-green, afternoon-green], a list that goes on and on, until finally arriving at ‘verde-distância’. It conjures the forest – a landscape that summons and escapes the logics of occupation, control and naming. Distance here is not only spatial but emotional, temporal and political. It’s a condition for listening between bodies and worlds, a space where something can emerge. Monteiro’s writing collapses time; it moves between rhythm, memory and myth.

TT So, the title isn’t a curatorial ‘theme’ in the traditional sense.

MM Right, I don’t really work with fixed themes. My approach begins with questions, intuitions and sensibilities while cultivating an atmosphere that shapes how one encounters a work and a set of practices. This is a biennial rooted in the Pan-Amazonian context, and verde-distância is something that pulses through it – a condition that holds contradiction, complexity and feeling. The selection was guided by three conceptual directions, sonhos, memória and sotaque [dreams, memory and accent] – ideas present in the practices of the artists we invited. They became ways of naming shared concerns: imagination as a tool of survival, memory as a living territory, sound as language.

TT You brought on Sara Garzón and Jean da Silva as part of the curatorial team. What did that collaboration look like?

MM A biennial is a major undertaking, and building the right team is essential. Collaboration means committing to multiplicity, listening and shared construction. Sara Garzón, from Colombia, brings a deep curatorial engagement with histories of resistance, knowledge exchange and solidarity networks that challenge colonial and anthropocentric structures. Jean da Silva, from Belém, works at the intersection of cultural access, memory and climate justice. Our approaches differed but were aligned. The process was embedded in dialogue, site visits and responsiveness – keeping the project porous and open to the unexpected.

TT What was your approach to selecting the 73 artists in the exhibition?

MM The selection grew through connection: works that spoke to each other, artists whose practices resonated across geographies. It was also about convening people who might not otherwise meet and acknowledging the conditions that shape how art is made and shared. The 73 artists reflect a process of listening, learning and relationship-building over time.

For instance, Peruvian artist Sara Flores transmits ancestral knowledge through rhythmic, repetitive drawings based in the practice of kené, a geometric and relational design system passed down through Shipibo-Conibo women. Nathalie Leroy Fiévée, from French Guiana, uses sound, voice and gesture to access bodily and intergenerational memory. Roberto Evangelista’s drawings and texts reflect on the transmission of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian histories. These practices reveal that memory isn’t about fixing the past but about maintaining it – recovering what has been displaced or silenced, and allowing it to persist through form, gesture and relation.

TT The biennial is rooted in a specific geography but clearly speaks to global concerns. How are you navigating that balance between regionalism and internationalism?

MM It’s a crucial tension. The Amazon territory is often framed either as hyper-local and isolated, or as a symbol in global environmental discourse. We wanted to avoid both. The biennial is situated in the regions’ languages, movements, and traditions, but it also looks outward. We invited artists from the Caribbean and other parts of Latin America with shared colonial histories and environmental struggles. It’s not about flattening connections but about thinking through resonant, relational conditions, where the global rests on difference.

TT You’re also artistic and executive director at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances [CARA] in New York. Has your experience there influenced your thinking around this biennial?

MM At CARA, we’re thinking about care and research not as institutional add-ons, but as the core of what we do. One question we ask is: how can we dream not only about ourselves? That comes from the Yanomami thinker and activist Davi Kopenawa, who writes in his book Falling Sky [2010] that white people dream only of themselves. That line has stayed with me. At the biennial, I kept asking: how do we create a space for collective dreaming or imagination, for mutual recognition?

Also, building CARA from the ground up taught me how to unlearn institutional habits. That means thinking differently about timelines, hierarchies and accountability. That ethos translated directly into how we approached this biennial – as something alive and relational, rather than fixed or extractive.

TT Who is this biennial for?

MM: For people in Belém, for the participating artists, and for the neighbourhoods that are hosting the work, or visitors encountering these territories for the first time. We thought carefully about access – physical but also cultural, linguistic and affective. The biennial isn’t something to be consumed; it’s an invitation to stay with complexity, to spend time and to relate differently.

TT Are there particular works that anchor the exhibition for you?

MM: Kuenan Mayu, an artist of Tukano and Tariana origin, uses ancestral materials like tururi bark to give visual form to her peoples’ cosmology. Her work weaves spirituality and territory, affirming the body as a sacred conduit between land, sky and water. In her series ‘Tchaune na Maū’ [2025], hybrid beings emerge as expressions of balance between nature and spirit, activating Indigenous mythologies and asserting continuity in the face of environmental and political violence. The collective Amazoniando brings Afro-Amazonian musical traditions like Marabaixo into the exhibition as a living practice where rhythm becomes memory, joy and struggle. In La vorágine más allá [Vortex Nukak, 2025], the Mapa Teatro group worked with Nukak people to challenge extractive logics, blending immersive theatre, video and sound into a poetic strategy of multispecies resistance.

TT Part of what you seem to be doing is expanding what counts as contemporary art.

MM Yes, we need to resist narrow definitions of what counts as contemporary. The Amazon isn’t a peripheral backdrop to global discourse, it’s a generator of knowledge and a place of invention and ongoing experimentation. That means rethinking timelines, materials and the systems that determine what is recognized, preserved or valued as art.

TT What do you hope people walk away with?

MM I hope the experience resonates with people long after they leave the exhibition – perhaps without answers or resolutions, but with questions that continue to unfold. What distances do we carry? What connections must we build? How do we learn to dream differently – together?

_{Main image: Belém. Courtesy: the Bienal das Amazônias; photograph: Fernando Sette}