The Most Radical Biennial You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

In the scorching Belém sun and Amazonian humidity, punctuated by sudden downpours, the second Bienal das Amazônias stood amid vibrant street graffiti and a blue poster reading, “Quem protege a vida das mulheres indígenas [Who protects the lives of Indigenous women?].” The Bienal is a few minutes away from the Guajará Bay, formed by the junction of the Guamá and Acará rivers, which flow into the Atlantic. How befitting, then, that upon entering the Bienal, one is greeted by the exhibition text, which reads: “They say rivers flow in two directions. Not only toward the Atlantic, but also toward sky, toward the future”.

One section is dedicated to the Bienal’s public educational programming, “Amazônias as Pedagogy”, which referenced the work of Amazonian artist, educator, and thinker Roberto Evangelista (1946–2019). Amazônias as Pedagogy drew from Evangelista’s book Sementes Germinantes, which loosely translates to “Germinating Seeds”. Evangelista’s monumental works, such as Ritos de Passagem [Rites of Passage] (1996) and Niká Uiícana [Family] (1992), were showcased in the artist’s homeland after installations at the 23rd São Paulo Biennial. The artist is known for his engagement with the concept of florestania throughout his oeuvre. Coined by Amazonian Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak in Futuro ancestral [Ancestral Future] (2022), florestania conjoins the terms “forest (floresta)” and “citizenship (cidadania)”. Florestania explores the intertwined relationship between ecological protection and human rights – a concept present throughout Evangelista’s empty shoe boxes and muddied, soiled soles that make up Ritos de Passage, and transcendental feathers, suspended mid-air in commune with the spiritual realm that became family in Niká Uiícana (1992).

Not often does one get to view works in a space with multiple sites of reference as vast and expansive as the Bienal das Amazônias; the Bienal not only references the Amazon itself, but also the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Andean. Historically, Brazil served as the largest destination of the transatlantic slave trade – so much so that a common 17th-century saying, “without sugar, no Brazil; without slaves, no sugar; without Angola, no slaves”, was documented in Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 by historian Joseph C. Miller. Naturally, one cannot converse about the Amazon without conversing about the Atlantic, and vice versa. The Amazonian ties to the Caribbean and the Andean are also similar; all these sites share a geographic, hydrological, and cultural tie to one another.

Therefore, when one absorbs the contextual complexity of Evangelista’s Ritos de Passage, of which the soiled soles reminisce the temporary lives of ecocide enablers and environmental defenders, one is also confronted by collages of undocumented persons in the Afrodiaspora by Silvana Mendes (b. 1991) in Afetocolagnes: Reconstruindo Narrativas Visuais de Pessoas Negras na Fotografia Colonial – lives tampered with, in temporality. It is a melancholic reckoning that much of the Amazonian artistic expression in the Bienal is set against the backdrop of historical and present-day extraction in various forms: body, land, and rights. In Jean-François Boclé’s (b. 1971) Caribbean Hurricane (2010) installation, the Caribbean diaspora is examined through the 1920 Pan-African flag created by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey. The flag that represents anti-colonial struggles fanned alongside the colours of colonial powers of the Caribbean.

Rubén Barrios-Rodríguez’s (b. 1995) La Cadeta, Homo-Humus: El cuerpo a la vez campo, y campo a la vez cuerpo, 2024 [The Chain, Man-Earth: The body is at the same time the field, and the field, at the same time, the body] challenges gender identities and masculine constructs in the Caribbean with the artist’s queer perspective. A figure in coloured fringes emerges in and out of the periphery amidst the arid landscape of the Valley of the Moon, seemingly as delicate as filigree, yet as solitary as a warlord. Masculinities that are decadent, ornamental, and transient are laid bare in the Jordanian desert of Wadi Rum, in the artist’s video performance.

In the Bienal das Amazônias, the Amazon is an ancestor, a pedagogy, and an extensive site of veneration for Pachamama, or Mother Earth. Yet the Amazon does not solely concern itself as a centrifugal force that propels a Bienal involving artists, and by extension perspectives, from the Andean, Caribbean, and Atlantic forward. The Bienal das Amazônias is florestania in the sense that its ecology nourishes fertile ground for others to grow in parallel. The Bienal is so far removed from the quotidian white-cubed, institutionalised, sterile formalities of the art world that, in itself, it became art in its highest form – a cosmic expression.



Feature image: Astrid Gonzalez. Bienal das Amazônias 2025. Photo: Ana Dias. Courtesy Bienal das Amazônias