Amazons. The Ancestral Future
Installation view of Amazons. The Ancestral Future at the Contemporary Center of Culture in Barcelona. CCCB, 2024 / CC BY-SA-NC MartÌ Berenguer.
Amazons. The Ancestral Future is the current running show at the Contemporary Center of Culture in Barcelona (CCCB), an institution known for its structure that encompasses four axes of film, thematic exhibitions, debates and literary programme, and education. An exhibition as physically vast as the topic that it aims to traverse, it threads together cultural, artistic, and scientific elements. It winds throughout the entirety of the third floor of the center, combining immersive sound installation, maps, murals, photography, and sensorial interactions.
Its title, invoked from Indigenous knowledge and the concept of the circularity of time, challenges us from the outset to reconsider Western ideas of timekeeping. While there’s an undeniable feeling that we are presently on the verge of collapse, imminent catastrophe is not situated in the present alone. It reaches back for centuries into the beginnings of racial and colonial capitalism. This exhibition calls attention to the future as not something distant in our imagination but something that’s already present and past: looping around, folding, and collapsing back into itself.
Installation view of Amazons. The Ancestral Future at the Contemporary Center of Culture in Barcelona. CCCB, 2024 / CC BY-SA-NC MartÌ Berenguer.
Anchored by the central role of the Amazon as “the world’s largest tropical ecosystem,” the show uses the region as a vehicle to emphasize the importance of ecological balance for the planet. Too, it asks questions about the impact of human behavior, about the delicate ecological equilibrium that holds together the existence of life, and about the ancestral wisdom that unites a range of national, ethnic, and historical contexts. Curator Claudi Carreras names the goal of the exhibition as “invit[ing] us to immerse ourselves in a ritual dream to understand that we are all part of the same fabric and that the future of the Amazon is a common cause that concerns us all.”
With such a multiplicity of voices and identities—400 Indigenous groups and works by over 50 artists and collectives—an enormous cultural mosaic is reflected in the exhibition. It offers a reminder that the Amazon is composed of both the historical and the contemporary, forging a narrative through documentary-style interviews, murals, and photography, much of which were specially commissioned for the show.
Installation view of Amazons. The Ancestral Future at the Contemporary Center of Culture in Barcelona. CCCB, 2024 / CC BY-SA-NC MartÌ Berenguer.
One standout is a mural by artist and activist Daiara Tukano. It swallows an entire gallery wall and portrays Indigenous gatekeepers in a stand-off against the destruction imposed on their home forest. There is detailed and glowing line work in the silhouettes of flora and fauna, cradled by the central material figure standing in contrast at the mural’s center. Their entanglement invites the idea that culture, life, and land are bound up in each other.
Situated on the wall is a multi-channel video installation by documentarian Eliane Brum. Her piece shifts between ceremonial rituals performed in remote parts of the Amazon and the frenetic day to day of the activists in Manaus, reckoning with being pushed out of their homes from extreme weather conditions or urban developers. The impact of the spasmodic cuts between the serenity of ritual in a natural environment and the devastation of resource grabs is significant. However, it’s in this shared rhythm we can feel that we’re all a part of the same fragile ecosystem.
Installation view of Amazons. The Ancestral Future at the Contemporary Center of Culture in Barcelona. CCCB, 2024 / CC BY-SA-NC MartÌ Berenguer.
While the exhibition challenges its visitors to consider alternatives of time, it also asks them to consider what it means to take an active role in caring for an environment under threat. How can we take ownership beyond playing mere witnesses to our own collapse? Present with the reality of the destruction and suffering faced by the Amazon is the ethic of care within the exhibition as a whole. It illuminates how the everyday work of care and guardianship, so intimately connected to Indigenous life, is itself a form of warriorhood. The pieces evoke a sense of cyclical reciprocity—each heroic act feeds another.
One of the most profound elements of the exhibition is the way it reframes power as inseparable from care. We see guardians whose fierceness is driven by an unwavering commitment to protecting life rather than conquest. As you move through Amazons, that sense of weaving—of forging alliances and tending to collective well-being—infuses the artwork with an almost ceremonial significance. The broader lesson is that there is power in compassion and that meaningful renewal requires a vigilant, almost warrior-like devotion to sustaining life.
Amazons. The Ancestral Future is on view at the Contemporary Center of Culture in Barcelona from November 13th, 2024 to May 4th, 2025.
