Capital of the syllables of water, father patriarch, you are the secret eternity of fertilization, rivers fall upon you like birds.
Pablo Neruda, “Amazonas”, 1938

The 6th Montevideo Biennial is dedicated to the Amazon and is a contribution to the COP30, which will take place in November 2025 in Belém do Pará. With this, Uruguay strengthens its political and cultural ties with Brazil and the world.

The earth knows a handful of vast regions that particularly stimulate people's imaginations and advance toward mythical dimensions with the suggestive power of their images. Beyond the Southern Seas, the Sahara, Siberia, and the Himalayas, the Amazon also belongs to this almost supernatural category, containing our most secret presentiments and evoking simultaneously nostalgia and terror, promises of freedom and anxiety.

The geographic dimensions of the Amazon are awe inspiring in themselves: it stretches over 7 million square kilometers and encompasses nine countries, almost half of South America, of which 4 million square kilometers—the size of Western Europe—are part of Brazil. However, the Amazon's biodiversity is even more impressive than its physical dimensions, hosting at least one million animal and plant species in its 50-million-year-old forests—60% of all life forms on planet Earth—of which only 30% has been scientifically studied so far. There are more species per square kilometer in the Amazon than in all of Europe.

Although deforestation, illegal land occupation, and expansive agriculture are serious problems, 80% of the Amazon region remains intact, in contrast to the tropical rainforests of Central Africa and Southeast Asia, which gave way to oil palm plantations in just a few decades.

As the epitome of the tropics, the Amazon embodies all the contradictions that generally characterize the Earth's equatorial regions. The abundance of nature contrasts sharply with the precarious living conditions of many of its inhabitants, as Claude Lévi-Strauss described in his book "Tristes Tropiques" in the middle of the last century. To this day, the Amazon is one of the poorest areas in South America.

The Amazon is a place where heaven and hell, abundance and extreme need, live side by side, where fertile imagination and desolation combine in magical realism, excess and tedium alternate. Nowhere is man closer to life, but also closer to death.

Like most other regions of the continent, the Amazon, whether on the Spanish or Portuguese side, was the scene of colonial conquest, ruthless exploitation, slavery, and the annihilation of the indigenous population.

Only with the modernists did Amazonian culture positively enter the consciousness of Brazil's urban elite and help create a national identity. We recall Mário de Andrade's travel diary "The Apprentice Tourist" (1927), his classic novel "Macunaíma" (1928), and his "Folklore Research" expedition to the north and northeast of the country in 1938.

In recent decades, appreciation of the Amazon has continued to grow, not only for its ecological importance, but also for Indigenous art and the poetic potential of the region in general. Major museums in Brazil and the São Paulo Biennial now exhibit Indigenous art. In this context, it is also worth remembering the "Indigenous Games," which were held in parallel with the Rio Olympic Games in Palmas (Tocantins) in 2016 and which were reflected by artists.

The Brazilian government has promised to devote more attention to the Amazon in its quest to balance the protection of nature with the economic and social interests of the region's 30 million inhabitants. At the request of President Lula, the COP-30 World Climate Conference will be held in Belém do Pará, from November 10 to 21, 2025. This event is a fitting occasion for an art exhibition that will guarantee national and international visibility. Like never before, the world's eyes are on the Amazon, as the ecological issue becomes increasingly urgent. At the same time, the wisdom and experience of the Amazon's ancestral and indigenous cultures have gained visibility and value, perhaps like never before.

It will be interesting to observe whether the approaches of Amazonian artists differ from those of other latitudes and what aesthetic "temperatures" they produce in each case. Endogenous and exogenous perspectives—that is, those experienced or brought from outside—come into creative conflict to ultimately achieve that "tropical truth" that Brazilian Tropicalism always sought.

One would not do justice to the Amazon if it was reduced to its role as the "lungs of the planet" and as a carbon storage in the face of climate change, as is being demanded in Europe and North America. The region's wealth lies not only in its biodiversity, but also in the diversity of indigenous life. Several hundred languages and just as many worldviews still exist today. So-called "isolated peoples" still live in the western part of the Amazon—in other words, indigenous communities who have had no contact with the outside world and who practice a sustainable relationship with nature. The non-simultaneity of modernity is evident in Brazil, where megacities coexist with indigenous and ancestral peoples, all within the same country. Nowhere is the diversity and plurality of different ways of life more evident than in Brazil.

The Montevideo Biennial does not treat the Amazon primarily from a utilitarian perspective, promising mere economic or ecological benefits, but rather as a value in itself, nourished by its poetics and aesthetics. The grandeur of nature is combined with the sublime of art, so that the notion of another, better life becomes possible.