Amazons
Rainforest is Female
Program curated by Eliane Brum
Journalist and writer Eliane Brum curates a series of conversations with indigenous activist leaders Ehuana Yaira Yanomami, Patricia Gualinga and Txai Suruí, and archaeologist Eduardo Neves to discuss the struggles in the Amazon today.
‘The violation of the body of the forest is the same as the violation of women's bodies. Invading, colonising, emptying, turning into objects or merchandise: this is the logic that has led and continues to lead us to the collapse of life on Earth’.
Eliane Brum
We are in uncharted territory. Our home-planet is warming, species are disappearing, extreme events are getting worse and more frequent, there are increasing numbers of refugees and climatic deaths. The quality of life for humans and most other species is increasingly deteriorating, and, if nothing is done, in a few decades or maybe even a few years, new generations will live in a hostile environment. Those who alter the Earth's landscape have a name, they are mostly white and male, and they are associated with large transnational corporations and the governments and parliaments that serve them and their colonial capitalist practices. They won't stop consuming the planet. It is up to us to stop them. To do so, we must uncover the centralities of power, transform ourselves into other kinds of humans and create models of societies very quickly, because the corrosion of the Earth is accelerating faster every day.
The Brazilian writer and journalist Eliane Brum, who lives in the Amazon Rainforest, has been arguing for years that our only possibility is to recentralize the world. The Amazon and the other enclaves of Nature that still support life, such as the oceans and the rest of the biomes, are the legitimate centers of a world in climatic mutation caused by a minority of human beings who devour merchandise. The center is where life is, and not where the markets are.
To understand other ways of existing and being in the home-planet, Eliane invites three indigenous women from the Amazon, whose peoples have never been separated from Nature. On the contrary, their ancestors planted part of the largest tropical forest on the planet and live in relationship with all forest beings, visible and invisible. From different parts of the forest, they have in common their struggle to re-exist - to resist in order to exist —the increasingly intense attacks against the body-forest— their bodies: Patricia Gualinga, Ecuadorian, Ehuana Yaira Yanomami and Txai Suruí, Brazilian. She also invites the Brazilian Eduardo Neves, one of the most important archaeologists dedicated to the study of the Amazon's past, for a debate on the recentralization of values based on ancestral experience. By rescuing the memory of the forest, archaeology demonstrates that another world is possible - because other worlds have been possible and because many others still resist.
"Rainforest is Female" is a series of conversations curated by Eliane Brum in the framework of Resident CCCB, an international residency program of the CCCB in collaboration with Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and supported by Fundació Privada MIR-PUIG.
This activity is part of Amazons
Related contents
Eduardo Neves
Wild Memory
The archaeologist Eduardo Neves has worked to debunk the myth of the Amazon as a realm without humans, pointing out that it was intensely populated by Indigenous societies which shaped it to become the centre of biodiversity for which is known today, but which is also being ever more rapidly destroyed. In recovering the memory of the rainforest, archaeology shows that another world is possible because other worlds have already been possible.
Txai Suruí
Postponing the End of the World
The activist and youth leader Txai Suruí speaks with the journalist and writer Eliane Brum about the struggle of young people who are trying to combat the climate crisis in Brazil, and about the resistance of Indigenous communities against extractivism, deforestation, enormous fires, and about bodies that make it possible to postpone the end of the world.
