What's on Exhibitions

Amazônia: Sebastião Salgado at MAXXI in Rome

By: Wanted in Rome

Date:

01 Feb, 2022

MAXXI takes visitors on a dramatic audio-visual journey into the heart of the Amazon in an exhibition running until 25 April.

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.

Indiana Yawanawá. Stato di Acre, Brasile, 2016. © Sebastião Salgado/Contrasto.

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."

Giovani donne Suruwahá. Stato di Amazonas, Brasilel, 2017. © Sebastião Salgado/Contrasto.

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."

Full information and visiting details for the exhibition, which has been extended until 25 April 2022, can be found on the MAXXI website.

Cover image: Sciamano Yanomami dialoga con gli spiriti prima della salita al monte Pico da Neblina. Stato di Amazonas, Brasile, 2014. © Sebastião Salgado/Contrasto.