How do you play a rainforest? I was once told that the rainforest makes deafening noise especially at night. On 7 June, I got to hear the same thing in the installation Altamira 2042, thanks to the Holland Festival. In that performance, Brazilian artist cum documentary filmmaker Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha managed to make the sound of the tropics palpable. In a performance that also ended up making the death cry of that same rainforest pierce through the marrow.
Altamira 2042 is a manifesto against the dam on the Rio Xingu, following the Three Gorges Dam in China the largest on our planet, with which the Brazilian government wants to alleviate its energy problem. The dammed river swallows the lives of countless known and unknown plant and animal species, millennia-old cultures and knowledge, while the forest and water die a slow death and deserts are created downstream.
Two journalists disappeared
I did not know about that dam, and am fully prepared to support any protest against so much human inanity. More so because that inanity is being used by one of the most evil regimes in the world. Meanwhile, two journalists investigating abuses around the dam have disappeared. That happened recently, the maker of the performance asked us afterwards to support them by sharing a hashtag. Herewith.
How powerless you can be, and how helpless you are as an artist in the face of history. If the Altamira 2042 project made me feel anything, it was that. The makers do their best to make the forest and its destruction palpable, but the ritual they build around it is mostly a lot of fuss. Documentary excerpts are made audible, ancient inhabitants of the forest let their voices and their latest stories be heard, we are in the dark and via funny Bluetooth speakers with blinking lights we enter a kind of spirit world. Pretty atmospheric, at times.
Fly one more time
But how do you break down the madness? With hammer and chisel, say the creators. If you keep hammering long enough, the Dam will break through by itself. Someday.
As theatre, it was all a bit too obscure, but the message became clear to me. And for that, they were quite welcome to fly in from Brazil. In terms of climate.
Share those hashtags, then we will at least do something.
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