CARLA MALDONADO

"Carla Maldonado‘s 2019 film Dystopia of a Jungle City, and the Human of Nature was created in collaboration with Cipiá Indigenous Community Center, Manaus. With editing that evokes the rhythm of forest sounds, it is a haunting ode to their daily life in fragile harmony with nature, and an alarming call for action against the far-right regime of Jair Bolsonaro, which aggressively attacked the laws protecting the Amazon forest and people. In September 2019, the U.S. and Brazil agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon. Drought-related and intentionally set fires (which grew by 84% in 2019) and advancing deforestation will soon lead to the tipping point, when the entire forest will start dying. It will have catastrophic effect on global climate. The artist lends us her lens to gaze at this dying ecosystem. The film presents tragically conflicting points of view: one of Bolsonaro’s regime and global corporations, and that of indigenous people, who already live in close proximity to “civilization” and are increasingly dependent on it, silently asking us where we stand. Maldonado walks jungle paths and city streets recording the outcasts, struggles and revolutionaries of our time. She understands ecofeminism as the fight against the degradation of the environment by patriarchal power structure and capitalist economy. In other works, searching for a successful revolution to ensure survival, she looks to female leaders of native communities in Brasil – women who understand our connection to nature." Monika Fabijanska

"Intersectionality is at ecofeminism’s core, and environmental racism — the fact that BIPOC communities are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation — is central to its project. Brazilian artist Carla Maldonado collaborated with the Cipiá Indigenous Community Center in Manaus to make “Dystopia of a Jungle City, and the Human of Nature” (2019). Alternately four- and single-channel, the video pairs footage of the Indigenous community’s day-to-day life with layered forest sounds. A voiceover by Maldonado explains that, under Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, private-sector development is rapidly deforesting the Amazon as protections for the Amazon’s Indigenous peoples are being pared back." Hyperallergic 

"ecofeminism(s) suggests that the knowledge we require to adapt is being carried, recovered, and newly imagined. Learning and amplifying traditional knowledge is yet another strategy of ecofeminist art, which is best accomplished here in one of the most recent works on view, Carla Maldonado’s Dystopia of a Jungle City, and the Human of Nature (2019). This documentary film depicts the threat to Brazil’s indigenous people under the regime of Jair Bolsonaro, who is committed to developing the Amazon rainforest and revoking laws protecting their lands. “The Amazon Forest is my economic strategy,” Bolsonaro declares chillingly at the start of the film. A radically different strategy of relation with the Amazon is presented in footage from Maldonado’s time with the Cípia people, who carry on traditional ways of life a stone’s throw from the city of Manaus, where urbanization and fires encroach on the forest. We see the Cípia community making plant medicines, building homes, and continuing to live in mutual contingency with the land under increasing external threat. In many ways, it would be easier to concede to pressures to abandon their way of life. The film concludes with footage of native women protesting in Rio de Janeiro, one of whom puts into words the point of carrying on: “We, the indigenous women, have mobilized in Brazil’s capital city, to say that we won’t stand for genocide politics against us. They say they must integrate us into contemporary society, but what kind of society is that?…The destruction of our environment is our own destruction.” Brooklyn Rail