Sebastião Salgado

AMAZÔNIA

The Exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s Photographs in Trieste

Salone degli Incanti
29 February 2024 – 13 October 2024

After the success enjoyed in Rome and Milan, Sebastião Salgado’s great exhibition – Amazônia -, will be held in Trieste, at the Salone degli Incanti, from 29 February 2024 to 13 October 2024

More than 200 photographs depicting the vegetation, rivers, mountains and people inhabiting the Amazon rainforest are on display. It is a full immersion into the rainforest, a journey through the cultures of the peoples who inhabit it, and an amazing discovery of the Amazon region.

The exhibition sound track was specially composed by French musician Jean-Michel Jarre.

Lélia Wanick Salgado, the photographer’s work and life partner, is the exhibition curator and designer.

Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia exhibition in Trieste

The over 200 photographs on display in this exhibition focus on two major themes: landscapes and indigenous peoples.

Salgado’s Landscape Photographs

The first part features the sections:
Aerial Views – the exhibition provides visitors with a look at sweeping aerial shots of immense waterfalls and stormy skies.
Flying Rivers – the Amazon rainforest is the only place in the world where the air humidity system does not depend on evaporation from the oceans: each tree disperse hundreds of liters of water per day, creating aerial rivers even larger than the Amazon River. Torrential Rains, clouds, captured dramatically, offering an ever-changing spectacle.
Mountains – Brazil also boasts mountain ranges, which feature peaks shrouded in mist and rainforest-covered lower slopes.
The Forest – once called the ‘Green Hell’, now to be regarded as a unique natural treasure.
Anavilhanas – Islands in the Stream, the archipelago between 350 and 450 islands of every ilmaginable shape emerging from the dark waters of the Rio Negro.

Photographs dedicated to indigenous peoples

In the centre of the Salone degli Incanti in Trieste, visitors will find three dwellings representing indigenous houses called ocas. Inside them, there one hundred photographs featuring the Amazon peoples, as well as some video interviews with their leaders. This part is dedicated to 12 indigenous groups that Salgado has immortalised during his many travels: Awa-Guajá, Marubo, Korubo, Waurá, Kamayurá, Kuikuro, Suruwahá, Asháninka, Yawanawá, Yanomami, Macuxi, and Zo’é.

Collaboration with Jean-Michel Jarre

An immersive audio track specially commissioned to Jean-Michel Jarre for the Amazônia exhibition brings to life the sounds of the rainforest.

It is a veritable world symphony composed of all the sounds of the rainforest: the rustling of trees, the cries of animals, birdsongs, or the roar of water rumbling down from mountain tops.  Visitors will also listen to the voices and songs of the indigenous peoples, from the sound archives of MEG, the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva.

The videos on show

For a really unforgettable experience, two rooms of the Amazônia exhibition at the Salone degli Incanti in Trieste will be showing videos. In one room, the images of rainforest landscapes will be accompanied by the sound of Erosão, a symphonic poem by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). In the other room, portraits of indigenous women and men are displayed, with background music specially composed by Brazilian musician Rodolfo Stroeter.

Inside the ocas, video interviews will be shown with some of the indigenous peoples’ leaders. They talk about the Amazon from their point of view; about the difficulties to be heard and have an impact on domestic policies, and about the importance of the rainforest for them.

Salgado’s World: an Environmentally Conscious Exhibition

Sebastião Salgado’s exhibition Amazônia aims to tell the story of the Amazon ecosystem, while providing a lot of information on its biodiversity and the cultural wealth of its inhabitants:  it’s a huge work of great artistic value and scientific popularization.

This exhibition is part of the commitment of Salgado and his wife to the preservation of the rainforest environment through community-relevant initiatives such as the Instituto Terra.

Amazônia Touch

The exhibition also includes the Amazônia Touch initiative, the first photographic volume conceived and designed for blind and visually impaired people. Thanks to the partnership between Lélia and Sebastião Salgado with the Visio Foundation, an institution that promotes the inclusion of blind people in cultural activities, at the Salone degli Incanti a book, available to visitors, offers access to photographs of the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities, thanks to tactile images made on brass plates. Twenty-one boards in acrylic resin and natural minerals allow you to experience tactile reading.

Sebastião Salgado: Biography

Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian photographer born in 1944, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He started his career in Paris in 1973, working as a professional photographer with photo agencies until 1994, when he and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado founded Amazonas images, an agency that deals exclusively with his work.

Salgado has travelled to more than 100 countries for his photographic projects, which have been published in numerous magazines and books such as Other Americas, 1986; Sahel: l’homme en détresse, 1986; Sahel: el fin del camino, 1988; An Uncertain Grace, 1990; Workers, 1993; Terra, 1997; Migrations and Portraits, 2000; Africa, 2007; Genesis, 2013; The Scent of a Dream, 2015; Kuwait, a desert on fire, 2016, and Gold, Serra Pelada Gold Mine, 2019. Lélia Wanick Salgado conceived, designed and edited each of his books as well as curated most of the touring exhibitions of these works, presented in museums and galleries around the world.

In 2013, the book De ma terre à la Terre (From my Land to the Planet), a narrative account of his life and career, was published. Some of Salgado’s travels and photographic projects are recounted in the documentary film The Salt of the Earth (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. It won the special prize for the “Un Certain Regard” section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and the César Award for Best Documentary Film in 2015. It was also nominated for Best Documentary at the 87th Academy Awards.

International Awards

Sebastião Salgado is a Godwill Ambassador of UNICEF and, among other distinctions, he was named an honorary member of the US Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous photographic prizes and prestigious honours, such as the Grand Prix National (Ministry of Culture, France), the Príncipe de Asturias Prize for the Arts (Spain), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (Pio Manzù International Research Centre, Italy). He was appointed Comendador da Ordem do Rio Branco, Brazil, and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France (Ministry of Culture). In 2016, Salgado was elected member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France and, in the same year, France named him Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. In 2018, he was made Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Culturel by the Principality of Monaco. In 2019, he was elected Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York, USA), and was awarded the International Peace Prize of the German Publishers‘ Association (Germany).

The Instituto Terra Project

Since the 1990s, Lélia and Sebastião have worked together on the restoration of part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, in the Rio Doce Valley of the state of Mina Gerais. In 1998, they turned this land into a nature reserve and created the Instituto Terra. The Instituto is dedicated to a mission of reforestation, conservation, and environmental education.

To date, Instituto Terra has created a forest that is home to many varieties of plant and animal species typical of the Atlantic forest. Since 2010, it has also developed a programme called Olhos d’Água, which works to recover, protect, and conserve the water resources of the Rio Doce catchment area, restoring tens of thousands of springs.