Curating from the Global South: The Making of the Bienal das Amazônias
Curator Manuela Moscoso on the ideas and collaborations driving the biennial’s second edition, centred on Pan-Amazonian and Caribbean perspectives.
Warawar Wawa, River Claure (2019 - 2020).
The first international art biennial dates back to the late 1800s, with the opening of what is now widely known as the Venice Biennale. The then newly proposed format was a large-scale showcase of an array of international artists, presented under what was understood as a global perspective at the time. Thankfully, since then, the concept of globality in the arts has expanded beyond Europe and the North, with the birth of the Havana Biennial in 1984 marking the beginning of an international artistic gaze towards the Global South.
Still, it was only in 2023 that the first international biennial dedicated specifically to the Amazonian region and its surrounding territories was launched in Brazil. With a curatorial proposition of connecting stories and weaving commonalities with singularities, the Bienal das Amazônias opens a dialogue for Pan-Amazonian interdependent stories, geographies, and practices. It is an important project that proposes a shift away from the traditional centres of contemporary art, focusing instead on Amazonian voices rooted in their own territories and surroundings.
The biennial’s 2025 edition proposes the concept of Verde-distância, or “distance-green”, inspired by the writings of local author Benedicto Monteiro. It represents “a spatial-temporal condition formed not by separation, but by relation: a form of distance that thickens perception and invites attunement across time, matter, and scale”. This edition explores the intertwined histories of Pan-Amazonian territories and the Caribbean through circulation and exchange, under the curatorship of Manuela Moscoso (Chief Curator), together with Sara Garzón (Adjunct Curator), Jean da Silva (Co-Curator of the Public Programme), and Mónica Amieva (Pedagogical Curator).
Ahead of the opening, Mola sat down with Moscoso to discuss the biennial’s proposal, her curatorial beliefs, and the importance of collaborative practices.
The Bienal das Amazônias is open to the public from 29 August to 30 November in Belém, the capital of Pará in northern Brazil, with a special public programme scheduled for 29–31 August.
Photo courtesy of Bienal das Amazônias. Photography by Ana Dias.
You’ve worked across several international institutions, developing exhibitions praised for their experimental and inclusive curatorial processes. Can you tell me a bit about your career trajectory? What have been some of the key stepping stones, professional or personal, that led you to curating this project?
Something that has become increasingly clear to me is that, as I grow older, I more fully identify as a migrant. Not only in the sense of moving between places, but in the deeper experience of leaving without the possibility of return. When I left Ecuador, there were no professional conditions for me to go back. At the time, I didn’t see this as formative, but in retrospect, that displacement opened a path that I’ve continued to follow, one shaped by movement, by necessity, and by learning across geographies.
My initial training was as an artist. I didn’t even know what a curator was. I came to curating through collective practice, through the process of running artist-led spaces. What has always grounded me is a commitment to learning with and from artists, not through academic theory alone, but through embodied, relational exchange. That is still the core of my curatorial practice today.
Later, I moved to New York on a scholarship to study at Bard. It was there that I encountered the gaps in what I knew – something many of us from the Global South experience when entering institutions in the North. At Bard, I encountered a research-driven environment and began engaging deeply with philosophy, especially object-oriented ontology. That framework expanded my sense of what curating could mean: a way of attending to material relations, temporal entanglements, and the agency of non-human actors.
Still, I felt the need to return to Latin America – not out of nostalgia, but to re-situate my thinking. That brought me to Brazil, where my practice was reoriented by another set of urgencies and alliances. Since then, my trajectory has remained one of movement, but also of return – return as a mode of care. I believe that where we go, we leave traces, and those traces demand attention. Without it, they disappear.
My involvement with the Bienal das Amazônias emerges from this ongoing path. It brings together many of the concerns that have shaped my work over time: the permeability between body and world, the epistemologies that resist dominant modernities, and the role of art in reconfiguring sensibility. It also returns me to territories I had already begun to explore through earlier research in Ecuador and Colombia. In that sense, the Bienal feels both like a culmination and a continuation – a situated practice grounded in relation, porosity, and re-encounter.
Las Cáscaras, video still, Lucía Pizzani (2013).
Could you tell us more about your curatorial process? How does the concept of Verde-Distância shape the way artists were chosen and how works are presented?
To curate a biennial, or to create anything, really, you begin with a set of conditions: there is an invitation, a time, a place, a set of urgencies, a team. And with that comes labour. Curating, especially at this scale, is fundamentally collective labour. We need to move beyond the idea of the solitary curator making selections from above. I see my practice as embedded – formed through collaboration, negotiation, and relation.
The invitation for this edition of the Bienal was clear: to reflect on the Pan-Amazonian region, with particular attention to its connections to the Caribbean and Afro-Amazonian territories. That includes places like Guyana and Suriname, which, although often overlooked, are profoundly connected to the Caribbean and to Amazonian flows. So there was an ethical and political commitment from the outset: to include artists from every country and every state that make up the Pan-Amazonian territory. In a way, this Bienal is a survey – not because it aims to be exhaustive, but because it is grounded in a place and its multiplicities at a specific moment in time.
Unlike biennials that take a globalised approach with only loose ties to a city, this one is deeply mediated by geography. The Bienal das Amazônias is not about the Amazon as abstraction, but about Pan-Amazonia as a lived, plural, and contested space, stretching from coast to coast, across vastly different territories and worldviews. Many of these places and artists have long been rendered invisible or peripheral. This project is a commitment to making them seen and heard – without claiming to speak for them.
My curatorial process usually begins with what I already know, or think I know, and expands from there. But I also begin by asking: how do we come to know places we’ve never been? What kinds of histories shape our perception of those places? These questions are important in a region as vast and complex as the Pan-Amazonia.
Equally vital has been the collaborative force of Sara Garzón, Adjunct Curator of the Bienal. Her rigorous thinking, deep commitment to decolonial practices, and expansive knowledge of Latin American and diasporic contexts have shaped this project in profound ways. Ours has been a partnership grounded in mutual trust, critical dialogue, and shared vision. Without her, this biennial would not be what it is.
Crucially, this is the Bienal das Amazônias, not the Bienal of Belém. That shift in naming also shifts the imaginary. Through that lens, we begin to trace relationships, build solidarities, acknowledge frictions, study limitations, and slowly shape the exhibition. The process isn’t about determining who is ‘good’ or ‘bad’; it’s about what makes sense in relation, what resonates within this specific framework, at this specific time. Memory matters. History matters. Accent matters.
Literature and poetry often provide powerful entry points. That’s how I arrived at Verde Vagomundo, a novel by Benedicto Monteiro that became a compass for this Bienal. In it, I found an image of the Amazon not as a fixed geography but as a zone of intensity – where distance thickens rather than separates, where what is far may feel close and what is close may remain opaque. That’s what Verde-Distância offers: a poetic, psychological, and relational way of encountering territory, one that shaped how we invited artists and how the works are now in dialogue.
K+neji / La Creciente del Canangucho, Aimema Uai.
Photo courtesy of Bienal das Amazônias. Photography by Ana Dias.
More than an exhibition, the Bienal aims to establish itself as “a manifesto from the Global South,” where art reveals the Amazon not as a void but as a “living and political territory.” What kind of political or social transformation does it aim to inspire?
More than an exhibition, this Bienal seeks to establish a situated gesture from the Global South, a space where art reveals the Amazon not as a void or untouched Eden, but as a living and political territory, dense with history, conflict, presence, and futurity.
And I mean, just look at the state of the world… What I cherish about the creative field is that it allows us to nurture imagination, to cultivate modes of thinking and sensing that resist linearity, specialisation, and separation. We move across disciplines; we experiment with research that is embodied, associative, and situated. That, to me, is already a political gesture. It affirms other ways of knowing and being – against the grain of extractive logic.
Of course, this kind of work has its limits. Art doesn’t write policy. What I do is not direct action. But it is a labour of sensibilities: learning through the body, listening across differences, sensing through time. We are not in the line of fire, but we can shift perception – and perception shapes possibility.
This Bienal becomes political through its scale and its stakes. It’s about representation, how the Amazon, and the Global South more broadly, are seen, spoken of, and by whom. What I can control is how we speak, how we express, how we contextualise. Who we bring together. What we amplify. That is already a form of intervention, even if always partial.
One of the most moving aspects of this process has been creating constellations that usually only emerge through Northern mediation. In the geopolitics of the present, it is rare to see artists from across Pan-Amazonia brought into direct, horizontal relation: River Claure from Bolivia, Brus Rubio from Peru, Carchíris from Maranhão in Brazil – sharing space, time, and imagination. That is powerful. That is beautiful. That is necessary.
How do your public programmes help bridge the gap between contemporary art and community experience?
We’re lucky to have two extraordinary teams shaping the public programme from different, yet deeply interconnected angles.
On one side, we have the educational team led by Mónica Amieva, who is originally from Mexico and brings with her a profound commitment to pedagogies of the South. Her work doesn’t just approach education as a method of transmission, but as a process of mutual learning rooted in the lived, affective, and territorial experiences of those involved. At the Bienal, she’s working closely with Emerson, a local cultural worker and educator in Belém, to develop a structure of programming that is both attentive and porous – something that grows from the ground up, not imposed from above.
At the same time, Jean da Silva, who curates our public programmes, plays a crucial role. Jean is an important cultural and environmental figure from Belém, especially known for his activism from the periphery. He initiated Cop das Baixadas, a grassroots environmental movement, and also runs Ghettahub, a self-organised cultural space in the city. His curatorial work is grounded in the belief that environmentalism and cultural production must not be treated as separate spheres: they are co-dependent, mutually reinforcing, and political.
Through Jean’s leadership, the Bienal’s reach has extended into neighbourhoods and spaces that are typically overlooked by large institutions. On weekends, for instance, we hold events in autonomous venues across the city, generating a sense of shared ownership and resonance beyond the exhibition itself. Jean builds bridges with communities that have historically been excluded from art spaces, not by simplifying or instrumentalising art, but by activating it through what matters locally: relationships, memory, land, celebration, resistance.
Together, Mónica and Jean demonstrate that public programming isn’t a side-note – it’s the living spine of the Bienal, where contemporary art meets collective experience in situated, transformative ways.
Photo courtesy of Bienal das Amazônias. Photography by Ana Dias.
The Bienal is funded under Brazil’s Federal Law for Cultural Incentives by companies such as Nubank, the Vale Cultural Institute, and Shell – one of the corporations most responsible for harm to the Amazon and the planet. This seems like a contradiction. How do you navigate this?
It’s true that the Bienal is supported through Brazil’s Federal Law for Cultural Incentives, which means funding often comes from industries that are themselves entangled in extractive economies. I think it’s important to acknowledge that there is no such thing as money free of contradiction – believing otherwise is an illusion. Entire regions, including the Amazon, and indeed the world, are sustained by industries such as mining or energy, which finance not only culture but also schools, hospitals, and social programmes.
Rather than deny these contradictions, we confront them with transparency. The Bienal does not speak on behalf of the Amazon, nor does it attempt to define it. My role as curator is to create conditions of proximity – spaces where artists can speak for themselves, where new relationships and alliances emerge.
The reality is that we are all implicated in extractive systems that do not align with our values. What we can do – and what we are doing here – is to remain conscious, make careful choices, and use the resources available to amplify voices that are rarely supported on a transnational scale. It’s a complex reality, and I take it as a responsibility to nurture connections, generate visibility, and support artistic production in a region that has historically been overlooked.
Any final thoughts?
For me, this Bienal has always been about collaboration. It’s not just a curatorial method – it’s a political stance. When we speak about biennials and cultural work from the Global South, we must insist on the centrality of collective effort. No project of this scale or complexity is made alone, nor should it be.
Of course, the process is imperfect. But what’s at stake is not perfection – it’s solidarity. If we don’t protect the possibility of working together, of building something across difference, across regions, across struggles, then we have very little to stand on in the face of rising fascism.
So yes, if I had to leave one thought behind, it would be this: collaboration is not optional. It’s the ground we stand on.
