In Conversation with Sara Garzón on Verde-Distância

Olinda Silvano, Untitled (Mural), 2025. Installation view at 2nd Bienal das Amazônias, 2025. Photo by Ana Dias.

By SABINA OROSHI September 22nd, 2025

The Bienal das Amazônias is a relatively new initiative based in Belém, Brazil, that seeks to reimagine how we think about art and territory from the perspective of the Amazon itself. Now in its second edition, Verde-Distância, the biennial takes its title from Benedicto Monteiro’s novel Verde Vagamundo, a work that conjures the Amazon as multiplicity – resisting reduction to a single, fixed image. This edition pushes beyond national frameworks, proposing the Amazon as more than bound to a place, it imagines the Amazon as a living, relational field that unfolds across borders, biomes, and histories.

In conversation with co-curator Sara Garzón, what emerges is the biennial’s bold attempt to redraw the map of the region along planetary lines. For the first time, territories such as Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana enter into dialogue with the Andes and the highlands, establishing connections between what is often imagined as forest and river and the broader ecosystems, communities, and histories that sustain them. Rather than offering a view about the Amazon, as so many exhibitions in Europe and North America have done, the Bienal das Amazônias speaks from the Amazon, foregrounding its own modes of expression, relation, and coexistence.

Q: This edition of the Bienal das Amazônias is framed by Benedicto Monteiro’s 1972 novel Verde Vagamundo, particularly the phrase verde-distância. What does this expression mean for you, and why did you choose it as a curatorial axis?

A: We were inspired by Benedicto Monteiro’s 1972 novel Verde Vagamundo, especially the incantatory passage on “thousands of shades of green,” where the author delineates a poetics of distance. Published during the Brazilian dictatorship, Verde Vagamundo offers an enumeration of greens—“wing green, sea green, forest green…”—that functions as a poetic inventory of the Amazon but also as a metaphor for multiplicity and resistance. Verde-distância is, therefore, a way of naming the complexity of the territory and a reminder that the Amazon cannot be reduced to one image or meaning. Not simply color or landscape, but defined through rhythm, presence, and relation.

Benedicto Monteiro (1924–2008) occupies a singular position in the political and literary history of the Amazon. Born in Pará, Monteiro was not only a writer and poet but also a lawyer, labor leader, and communist militant, deeply engaged with the social movements that shaped Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His novel Verde Vagamundo crystallizes this trajectory, combining the density of the Amazonian forest with the dilemmas of political and social struggle during a period of intense repression.

It is a kaleidoscopic and insurgent space that inspired my curatorial methodology so that we wouldn't fall into naturalist description nor abstract allegories. By bringing his political experience into dialogue, we wanted the exhibition to be both refuge and battleground: a territory where the struggle for re-existence connected with ancient, ancestral, and spiritual forms of life.

Sara Garzón, Associate Curator of 2nda Bienal das Amazônias. Photo by Ana Dias.

Q: Instead of dividing works by geography or medium, you’ve organized the Bienal around three “currents”: dreams, memory, and accents. Can you talk about these choices?

A: Dreams, memory, and accents (sotaki) are not themes, chapters, or subsections of the exhibition. They are entry points—ways of attuning to the wide and diverse artistic production present in the Amazon. Rather than fixing the exhibition by thematic conceptions, we chose to follow these currents because they carry multiplicity.

Dreams sharpen the senses to what vibrates outside dominant logics. Memory unsettles chronology. Accents as sound and rhythm traces how histories and experiences are embodied in tone and musicality. Memory does not sit still; it moves through body, sound, ritual, and texture.These starting and guiding points allows us to see what in an exhibition of 74 artists and almost 300 works of art, not everything is connected and yet everything is intertwined. They also allow artworks to be encountered not as representations but as presences. 

Q: The Bienal embraces Pan-Amazonian territories and also links them with the Caribbean. How do you see these geographies in dialogue?

A: Rivers, oceans, and forests have always been spaces of circulation—not only for goods but for people,  resistance, and dreams. The Amazon, the Andes, and the Caribbean are bound in one biome. The Caribbean appears on the edges of the Amazon in Suriname, French Guiana, Venezuela, and Colombia, which are not only intertwined environmentally with the ecologies that make up the Amazon both as forest and as urban centers. but also through their shared histories of creativity, survival, and reinvention.

From glaciers to rivers, highlands to deltas, Caribbean to forest floor, continuities emerge that resist separation. They link the Andes to the Amazon, Afro-diasporic thought to Indigenous memory, urban grief to environmental resilience. These flows remind us that reality is shaped not by national borders, but by the simultaneous experience of distance and proximity.

Q: You have written about decoloniality and Afro-Indigenous technologies. How do those research interests shape the ways you approached artist relationships and exhibition making in Belém?

A: My research on decoloniality and Afro-Indigenous technologies shaped not only my curatorial framework but also how I approached relationships with artists in Belém and the rest of the Pan-Amazonian territory. In many maker societies of the Amazon, what we might call cosmotechniques or socio-technological practices emerge through ritual, ecology, and community—forms of knowing that deepen local knowledge rather than abstract it. Artists in the Bienal showed this with extraordinary clarity: their works build, propose, and sustain modes of thinking that refuse the Western paradigm of technology as separation, extraction, or control.

Many pieces directly critique oil extraction, rubber tapping, and other ideologies of “progress,” not only to expose ecological devastation but to insist on alternative technological imaginaries rooted in local cosmologies and territorial knowledge. These are not technologies of appropriation; they are technologies of relation—practices that weave survival, memory, and imagination into lived environments.

Tawna, Uyaway 2025. Installation view at 2nda Bienal das Amazônias, 2025. Photo by Lucas Dilaceda.

Q: Sponsorship from large corporations raises questions about accountability. What practices did you put in place to maintain curatorial independence and transparency?

A: Curating in the Amazon means being acutely aware of how extraction, capital, and accountability circulate. From the outset, we made it clear that sponsorship could never shape artistic content or curatorial direction. Independence was safeguarded through transparency—with artists, with communities, and with the public.

We established mechanisms of dialogue: consultations with local advisors, assemblies with artists, and collective discussions about the implications of these partnerships. These spaces allowed us to draw limits together. For me, transparency is not only disclosure but responsibility—ensuring the Bienal does not reproduce the same logics of exploitation it seeks to critique.

Our conversations in Belém also made visible that extraction is not only mineral or natural—it is cultural. While protecting land and environment is urgent, safeguarding cultural life must also be a pillar of resistance to capitalist and colonial encroachment. Supporting artists, creating spaces for art, and sustaining the continuity of thought, language, and knowledge become essential when extractive industries impose monoculture, stripping away complexity until life itself is endangered.

In this context, the Bienal sought to affirm the recuperation, revitalization, and celebration of cultural practices as forms of resistance and survival. Safeguarding art and culture is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It sustains spaces for imagination and collective life in the face of systems built on erasure. Ultimately, maintaining independence meant aligning every decision with the integrity of the works and the communities they engage. The Bienal had to remain a space of resonance, not compromise.

Q: To end, did this project change the way you think about your role as a curator?

A: This project made me more aware of the contradictions of working within institutional logics that are often resistant to transformation. We set out to imagine a Bienal that could be porous, relational, and rooted in its context, but we constantly faced limitations—not from artists or communities, but from the bureaucratic and institutional structures that diminish their role. These logics tend to uphold the status quo rather than create conditions for sustainable cultural ecosystems.

At the same time, it showed me the scale of what is possible when artists, communities, and social actors come together despite those constraints. The Bienal became less about overcoming every obstacle and more about carving spaces of possibility within them. It sharpened my understanding that curating today requires not only care for artworks and audiences, but also a critical engagement with the very systems that frame and sometimes restrict what we do.

Alessandro Fracta, Sonhos de uma Amazônia sem Fim, Encantado (2023). Installation view at 2nda Bienal das Amazônias, 2025. Photo courtesy of Alessandro Fracta.

SO: As our conversation comes to a close, I find myself returning to one thought that stayed with me. Curation here feels less like authorship and more like reciprocity. Verde-Distância makes clear that a biennial is not a closed statement but an open constellation, where works, artists, and communities exceed what curators alone can hold. This biennial nurtures continuities, sustains contradictions, and resists simplification. What makes this edition so vital is precisely that it was not a biennial about the Amazon, but one from the Amazon. It created a platform for voices too often excluded, and it brought together unconventional and unexpected artistic choices, affirming the Amazon as a locus of creativity, dialogue, and invention.

The 2nd Bienal das Amazônias: Verde-Distância
Belém, Brazil: August 29–November 30, 2025

Curatorial team: Manuela Moscoso and Sara Garzón
Jean da Silva, Co-curator of Public Programs, and Mónica Amieva, Pedagogical Curator.