CCCB Barcelona’s Epic Amazon Exhibition Looks To An Ancestral Future
An extensive new exhibition at the CCCB in Barcelona takes a look at the art, culture, biodiversity and history of the Amazon and its indigenous peoples. A multi-sensory experience featuring video, paintings, sculpture, sound installations and scent.
Rember Yahuarcani, Aquells altres mons (díptic), 2024. Acrílic sobre llenç. Cortesia de l’artista. Rember Yahuarcani, Aquells altres mons (díptic), 2024. Acrílic sobre llenç. Cortesia de l’artista.
CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona) was born as a cultural centre dedicated to the urban city. Founded in 1994 following the return of democracy to Spain and the Olympics in 1992, CCCB celebrated its 30th birthday in 2024. Originally founded as a complex for contemporary culture in Casa de Caritat, a 12thcentury convent in Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood, the CCCB has expanded over the years and in 2011 architects Elías Torres and Martínez Lapeña restored the Casa de Caridad theatre to create the CCCB Theater.
I visited the CCCB to see an epic new exhibition titled Amazonias. El Futuro Ancestral (Amazons. The Ancestral Future) and met with director Judit Carrera, who talked me through the pioneering multi-disciplinary approach that has become part of the organisation’s DNA. Carrera explained that CCCB’s programming is structured around four axes of film, thematic exhibitions, debates and literary programme, and education.
Amazonias Installation Photograph Courtesy of CCCB. Amazonias Installation Photograph Courtesy of CCCB
Judit Carrera: “At CCCB we break down the borders between disciplines. This multi-disciplinary approach is part of our identity.”
CCCB doesn’t have a permanent collection, which offers the flexibility to explore a wide range of topics. CCCB’s multi-layered programming sits at the interface between art, architecture, film, literature and science, forming a bridge between the arts and sciences with academia and education.
Judit Carrera (c) CCCB, Miquel Taverna, 2019. Judit Carrera (c) CCCB, Miquel Taverna, 2019
Exhibitions director Jordi Costa told me how inspiring he finds the multi-disciplinary approach of CCCB’s programming: “For me one of the most fascinating things about my work is to immerse myself in new topics, which involves a lot of documentation and reading.”
Recent exhibitions at the CCCB exploring the Brain and AI were hugely popular, and the latest exhibition about the Amazon looks set to be a blockbuster. Amazons. The Ancestral Future offers a deep dive into Amazonian culture, with an emphasis on highlighting indigenous voices proposing a way of living that is more in tune with and respectful of nature. Carrera stresses that the curation of Amazonias doesn’t take an apocalyptic approach, rather it emphasises what we can learn from indigenous communities and how we can recognise the value of nature that goes beyond political borders.
Amazons. The Ancestral Future is curated by Claudi Carreras with the collaboration of experts on the Amazon including Eliane Brum, author of “Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Centre of the World”, Jõao Paulo Lima Barreto, Emilio Fiagama, Lilian Fraiji, Valério Gomes, Nelly Kuiru, Eduardo Góes Neves, Daiara Tukano and Joseph Zárate.
Amazonia covers a vast and diverse territory crossing nine states and inhabited by more than 30 million people, with 60% living in urban areas. Over 300 different languages are spoken in Amazonia, which is the original habitat of 400 indigenous peoples. Amazonia is the world’s largest tropical ecosystem and acts as a barometer for the temperature of the entire planet. Amazonias highlights the massive ecological impact of the region that gives the world air, and topics explored by the CCCB exhibition including the destruction of the Amazon’s natural resources through deforestation, fires, drought and struggles for raw materials, provide a wakeup call that if we don’t start to take care of the Amazon’s precious ecosystem, it’s game over for the world.
Víctor Moriyama, Floresta queimada, 2019. Cortesia de l’artista. Víctor Moriyama, Floresta queimada, 2019. Cortesia de l’artista.
CCCB Director Judit Carrera explains that the exhibition was four years in the making: “The first conversation about the Amazon exhibition started four years ago. Because it’s a very large topic. We have a local curator who mediated with nine Amazonian curators and artists. It’s about breaking stereotypes about the Amazon and making people more aware of what is at stake there.”
When I toured the exhibition with its curator Carrera Claudi, who spent two years travelling through the Amazon to capture footage and meet artists and experts in preparation, he stressed how important it was to include indigenous curators in the exhibition.
Carrera Claudi: “It’s really important to create a discussion about the Amazon. We decided to include nine curators from the Amazon in the selection committee for the exhibition. The idea was to introduce the spirit of the Amazon to the viewer and create an environment for that. So in the exhibition you can smell, hear and I hope also feel something of the Amazon. We have the energy of more than nine artists who were working on site at the exhibition to create the environment.”
Amazonias is a multi-layered, intelligently constructed, thoughtful look at different aspects of the Amazon, from the mythologies and history of Amazonian art, culture, to botany, fauna, flora, climate change, sexuality, geography, exploitation and colonialism. A multi-sensory experience, the exhibition combines visual arts with sound installations, artefacts, maps, historical documents such as the first illustrated map of the Amazon —Martin de Saavedra y Guzman’s 1600 ‘Mapa del Rio Amazonas’, which is on loan from the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana in Madrid —and even recreations of scents particular to the Amazon.
Curator Carrera Claudi Photographed By Lee Sharrock Carrera Claudi Photographed by Lee Sharrock
In one room a wall is covered with delicate drawings of Amazonian plants and wildlife by Confucio Makuritofe Hernández and also features a vast painting by Elías Mamallacta created with Ayuasca sap, juxtaposed with life size costumes of animal spirits. This is bought to life with a sound installation capturing 24 hours in the Amazon, and aromas of the Amazon ranging from fresh rain in the jungle to the smell of burning trees, created from scents transported by Carrera Claudi from the rainforest to Barcelona and translated into candles.
CCCB Barcelona. Installation photograph of 'Amazonias' exhibition. CCCB Barcelona. Installation photograph of 'Amazonias' exhibition.
Distilling the immense botanical, cultural and geographical richness of a vast territory covering seven million km and encompassing Brazil, Peru and Colombia, is no small task. Yet Carrera Claudi and the team of indigenous curators, artist and experts including the Bioacoustics Applications Laboratory of the UPC, Ernesto Ventós Foundation and VIST Foundation have created a museum quality, thought-provoking and magical experience that transports visitors to another world.
Many of the works featured in Amazonias were specially commissioned, including Andrés Cardona’s photographs and audiovisual montages, an artistic installation by Santiago Yahuarcani and Nereyda López, and new murals painted on site at the CCCB by the MAHKU collective, Rember Yahuarcani, Elías Mamallacta, and Olinda Silvano and Cordelia Sánchez.
MAHKU paintings. Photograph by Lee Sharrock MAHKU paintings. Photograph by Lee Sharrock
Joao Paulo Lima Barreto curated the introductory room of the exhibition, titled ‘Cosmologies and Cosmovisions’, an installation highlighting the three stages of the kihti-ukuse on the construction of the earthly world and the cosmovision of the Tucano people. Kihti-ukuse explains how humans and waimahsa (humans that live in the domains of earth/ forest, water and air) settled in the new world.
The installation mentions tobacco, ayahuasca and coca, three important plants that are embedded in Amazonian culture. Ayahuasca is a plant infusion containing a natural hallucinogen called DMT, which is used in the Amazon in carefully controlled ceremonies for reaching an altered state of consciousness or for psychological healing. Indigenous people in Colombia and Peru have been using Ayahuasca for thousands of years for spiritual purposes or as a medicinal way of reconnecting with nature.
Amazonias installation photographed by Lee Sharrock Amazonias installation photographed by Lee Sharrock
Display cases contain hand-made figures created by Ninos Tikuna depicting the animal spirits that people turn into when they take Ayahuasca and inhabit the bodies of Amazonian creatures such as Panther’s, Snakes and Crocodiles. Other artists in the exhibition capture the Ayahuasca experience including Musuk Nolte’s photographic series ‘Las pertenencias del aire’, Márcio Vasconcelos’s ‘El Santo Daime a Brasil’ series of photographs, Cordelia Sanchez’s ‘Los Cuatros Mundos’ paintings which depict an Ayahuasca cosmology, and paintings by Olinda Silvano depicting the Shipibo-Conibo people of Peru that are accompanied by the 'Chant of Nixi Pae’, a site specific sound installation recorded by the MAHKU collective.
Artist and indigenous rights activist Daiara Tukano —full name Daiara Hori Figueroa Sampaio, a traditional Duhigô name, belonging to the Erëmiri Hãusiro Parameri clan of the Yepá Mahsã people-better known as Tukano —exhibits a series of monochrome paintings in the Cosmologies and Cosmovisions section. ‘The Amazon is a Woman’ depicts the Amazon as a feminine spirit bearing knowledge of plants.
Daiara Tukano: “It is through the deliberation of the Great Grandmother of the Universe, this great mother, this feminine spirit bearing the knowledge of plants, that the entire world around is generated.”
Daiara Tukano paintings in Amazonias exhibition. Photograph by Lee Sharrock. Daiara Tukano paintings in Amazonias exhibition. Photograph by Lee Sharrock.
Also on display are works by Lalo de Almeida, Alberto César Aráujo, Ashuco, Christian Bendayán, Rafa Bqueer, Luiz Braga, Sérgio Carvalho, CEA, Chicha ads, Colectivo Água (Pablo Albarenga, Soll Sousa and Mariana Greif), Rosalba Cuelo, Paulo Desana, Estúdio Bijari, Alessandro Falco, Laíza Ferreira, Emilio Fiagama, Nicola Ókin Frioli, Diego Guerrero, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Enrique Hernández, Yefferson Huamán, Karl Joseph, Emi Kondo, Alice Lepetit, Pedro Martinelli, Leydy Martínez Panduro, Monky, Yanda Montahuano, Victor Moriyama, Musuk Nolte, Jorge Panchoaga, Gerardo Petsain, Berna Reale, Abel Rodríguez, Lili Sandoval Panduro, Leslie Searles, Alexandre Sequeira, Gena Steffens, Marc Alexandre Tareu, Tawna (Nixon Andy, Tatiana López, Enoc Merino Santi, Boloh Miranda, Sani Montahuano, Mukutsawa Montahuano and Lucía Villaruel), Turenko Beça, Iván Valencia, Wara Vargas, Versus Photo (Gihan Tubbeh, Musuk Nolte and Renzo Giraldo), Gê Viana, Fernando Vílchez, Marcela Yucuna, William Yukuna, Zecarrillo, artistans from the communities Bora, Kukama and Urarina (Perú).
Amazonias also features contemporary art, literature and video installations by artists exploring a wide range of polemic topics including sexuality, racism and colonial exploitation. There is a taste of the Amazon’s club culture with the recreation of a nightclub, and voices of indigenous peoples can be heard in video interviews showing in a specially constructed hut.
Amazonias Installation. Photograph by Lee Sharrock Amazonias Installation. Photograph by Lee Sharrock
Amazonias offers a new perspective on experiences of the Amazon’s indigenous communities and city-dwellers through the lens of indigenous artists and curators. Through this lens it becomes clear that the Amazonian deep connection with nature and respect for our fragile ecosystem could provide a lesson for us all. We are living through an era of dangerous climate change and summer 2024 was the Earth's warmest on record according to the Copernius Climate Change Service, while 44.2 million acres of Brazil’s Amazon burned through in 2024—an area larger than the entire state of California. 2025 began with devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and it’s becoming more and more apparent that we need to reevaluate our relationship with nature and rewild our psyche.
However, the underlying message of Amazonias is not one of doom and gloom, but one of hope for a future where we are more connected with the earth. Mother Nature demonstrates how in this world everything is connected, and this is illustrated perfectly in the exhibition’s penultimate room which looks at mycelium and the connection between microscopic life, plants and fungus. At the end of the room is a stunning painting featuring the spiritual world of the Amazon by Rember Yahuarcani, who exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Almost like an Amazonian version of Hieronymus Bosch, Yahuarcani depicts a nocturnal spirit world inhabited by colourful animal-human hybrids and fairy-like creatures.
Amazonias is a truly immersive experience and offers a collective look at Amazonian culture while taking care to highlight indigenous voices that through art, thinking, science and activism propose other ways of living, growing and relating to nature.
Amazonias ends on a hopeful note with a completely captivating film projected in a circular globe shape in the final gallery of the exhibition. ‘To make you dream’ proposes that we unite together to change things for the better, with the words “It’s time to create a grand collective to change the world little by little.”
'Amazonias' exhibition Photograph by Lee Sharrock
Amazons. The Ancestral Future is at CCCB Barcelona until 4th May 2025.
The exhibition will tour to MABE, Museu de Arte de Belém do Pará in Brazil in September 2025.
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