Paris. Without talking about trends, it is clear that the Amazon is a recurring subject in museums. In addition to the “Amazonies” exhibition at the Musée des Confluences (read the JdA no 657, June 6, 2025), we can cite the one on ayahuasca which was already held at the end of 2023 at the Musée du quai Branly (read the JdA No. 623, Dec. 15 2023), as well as a traveling exhibition by Sebastião Salgado. “Amazônia” claims an approach far removed from ethnological discourse: co-curator Leandro Varison claims to want to show the “real natives” to counter the stereotypes attached to the populations of the Amazon. Subtitled “Indigenous Creations and Futures,” the exhibition includes many recent works of art, because its curators focus on the present and future of indigenous populations.
From the entrance, an installation of headdresses – which appears sculptural – of the Iný Karajá populations, terracotta figurines from the 1930s and videos with informational content on the Amazon alternate. This installation of caps shows that “indigenous heritage is still alive”explains Leandro Varison, these headdresses are still made today. However, the room panels give few chronological elements, and the few historical dates provided are scattered throughout the exhibition, as well as in extracts from a very interesting documentary series on the archeology of the Amazon (2022-2023), which unfortunately no chronological frieze completes.
Objects taken out of storage
The entire exhibition thus gives the viewer the impression of floating in an indefinite time, an impression reinforced by the works which deal with cosmogony and relationships with others in the Amazon. These themes structure part of the identity of the indigenous people, as illustrated in the beautiful paintings of Rember Yahuarcani (born in 1985 in Pebas, Peru) where long-legged birds and fantastic crocodiles reenact the creation of the universe. Also, in the performance photographs of Uýra Sodoma (born 1991 in Santarém, Pará, Brazil), the artist appears covered in ashes and plant fibers, like a non-human creature haunting the landscape.
Although the works are generally interesting, they interact more or less well with the showcases of traditional objects from the museum’s collections. Ceramics, woven baskets, ritual objects, masks and jewelry are presented in a classic way, in elegant light wooden display cases. A particular educational effort was made on the languages spoken in the Amazon, with maps, digital animations and a few sound extracts but no contemporary works. Indigenous artists and researchers came to the museum to explore the collections dedicated to the Amazon, including the Bororo populations, “who worked on the objects collected by Claude Lévi-Strauss”, specifies the commissioner. Adding: “Most of the objects in the exhibition had never been exhibited and remained in the museum’s reserves. » This attention to the place of indigenous people in a museum indicates a change in mentalities, as underlined by the artist and co-curator Denilson Baniwa, originally from the Brazilian Amazon, according to whom until recently “a person of indigenous origin had very little chance of seeing the work of one of their peers” in a museum.
However, the route suffers from a scenographic fault: the imposing volumes of the rooms are not exploited, and the walls are left white: no perceptible incarnation apart from the works. If certain works make us forget the absence of immersive decorations in the course, for example a video on the vegetation and the environment of the Amazon in the context of devastating fires (Jungle Fever, short film from 2022 directed by Takuma Kuikuro, member of the Kuikuro people, Haut-Xingu, Brazil), other sections appear empty and cold, and the end of the route is bathed in a “white cube” atmosphere specific to contemporary art places. The exuberance of the paintings by Brus Rubio Churay (born in 1984 in Pebas, Peru) and the beauty of the photographs by Iano Mac Yawalapiti, a member of the Yawalapiti people of Haut-Xingu, accentuate the aestheticization of works presented on white picture rails, at the risk of erasing their truly indigenous content. The specificities of body painting among different populations would therefore have merited development to complement the photographs.
The dialogue with the objects from the museum’s collections therefore does not work very well, even if the scenography of the last room attempts to facilitate it with the help of a central openwork module which highlights the traditional objects. Despite the quality of the works presented, the exhibition, lacking a historical approach, struggles to link these creations to the objects in the collections. This even if Denilson Baniwa recalls on this subject that “seeking to date indigenous art can be counterproductive because the boundary between past and present remains blurred.” Paradoxically, his works are the only ones to evoke the history of the Amazon: his digital collages humorously divert images of colonial propaganda from the beginning of the 20th century [voir ill.]. The exhibition therefore illustrates this ambiguous attitude in relation to a historical discourse on the populations of the Amazon.
