VIEWS FROM ABOVE
Student research and exhibition project collaboration between the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and Greenpeace Netherlands, September 2018 – February 2019.
Foreword
Marieke
The Non-Linear Narrative of the Amazon
Martin
About All Eyes on the Amazon and Why
Learning Interconnectedness
Views
Niels Schrader & Lauren Alexander
Brazilian
Patricia Bonilha
Networks,
Nature as Capital – The Sky Is the Limit
Hattie Wade
The Labour Named Deforestation
Cyan Bae
Spix’s Macaw
Felix Meerman
Financing Deforestation from the Netherlands
Lila Steinkampf
Serra Pelada, Brasilia
Mauro Tosarelli
3.678 Households – Recognising Displaced Women of the Belo Monte Dam
Cristina Lavosi
The Missing Link
Claude Nassar
This Is Not the Amazon
— Astrid Feringa & Jean-Baptiste Castel
EPLIOGUE
Conflicting Definitions of Key Terms: An Ecological Protest at the International Design Conference in Aspen, 1970–1971 — Alice Twemlow
Anna Schoemakers Executive Director, Greenpeace Netherlands
INTRODUCTION OF THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN KABK AND GREENPEACE
Saving forests sounds simple, but it is a complicated business. Talk about the Amazon within Greenpeace and you quickly find yourself discussing the global demand for soya, beef and timber, and the associated global supply chains. Biodiversity loss, human rights violations and climate change all come into view as you survey the scene.
For Greenpeace working with the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) was a chance to take a fresh look at this jungle of issues. It was also a chance to use Geographic Information System (GIS), satellite and drone data gathered as part of our All Eyes on the Amazon project so we could see the ancient rainforest in a different way. Predictably new eyes found new complexities and new issues, while recasting familiar discussions into new forms.
But even as we look down on the Amazon from above, it is necessary to approach the people who live there face to face. There are neither noble savages nor primitives in the jungle.
There are only people. People whose lives and choices are as valid as our own, and whose homes face obliteration in service to the voracious demands of the outside world. For us it was essential that the students address the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon at eye level, without looking down on them, or up to them. As it turned out, they went a step further, holding up a mirror to us and challenging us to account for some of the ways we have described the Amazon in the last decades.
In Brazil 2019 began with the inauguration of a new President. One who threatens all of the environmental progress that has been made in Brazil in recent decades. One who’s first act was to hand responsibility for the demarcation of new Indigenous lands to the ministry of agriculture, which has a very close relationship to an agribusiness lobby that wants to exploit them. Thanks to the complex biological, economic and social chains that connect the Amazon to all of us the consequences of that decision will be felt around the world. In 2019 watching the Amazon will no longer be enough.
Marieke Schoenmakers Director, Royal Academy of Art (KABK)
FOREWORD
The collaboration between the Dutch branch of Greenpeace and the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) is one that I am extremely proud of. Sharing insights and knowledge on the incredible complex topic of climate change, is a big gift from Greenpeace to the master students and teaching staff of the Non Linear Narrative course, and to the academy as a whole. By including students in the research, using yet unpublished photo and film material documenting the effects of deforestation on the Amazon rainforest, Greenpeace has given us the opportunity to share insights and develop future scenarios from a design point of view, and match them with the expertise of one of the biggest activist organisations in the world.
Together the students and the professional activists have combined the best of both worlds, as we have seen in the fantastic exhibition at the KABK’s galleries in February 2019, and again in this publication.
Views from Above is the kind of collaboration that the KABK is particularly fond of. It gives our students the opportunity to work on real assignments, and to apply and test their skills in real time, and with critical partners, who set high standards. I want to thank everybody involved in this project, all students, KABK teaching staff, Greenpeace researchers and writers: it is this kind of dedication we need to shape the strategies of the future.
Martin Lloyd Mobilization and Communication director, Greenpeace Netherlands
THE NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE OF THE AMAZON
At the beginning of 2018 we at Greenpeace set ourselves a goal to build more bridges and meet more people. To broaden our network.
There is always a danger, as an organisation, that you start to spend too much time in your own world. That you focus so hard on the task at hand, that you do not see the world changing around you.
So, when the phone rang, and someone said that they were from the KABK, and that they would like to do a project with us, and might we be interested, we said of course. And it was only a little bit later that we said, ‘What is non-linear narrative?’
The KABK website talks about non-linear narrative as merging the investigative methods of journalism and forensics with processing technologies of computer science and visual arts. That sounded like a heady mix of ideas and practices to work with, and it sounded very relevant to the work we do.
Greenpeace was founded 48 years ago by a group who mixed journalism, activism, ecology and science – with a little dash of mysticism – to try and engage with issues almost too big to comprehend. Issues that frequently defied efforts to place them within a comprehensible narrative.
48 years later we have a collection of names for the most critical threat to our own environment. We call it global warming, climate change, the greenhouse gas effect or global weirding. But even climate change is only a symptom of an underlying ecological crisis. A crisis brought on by a species that has become so destructive that it has its own geological epoch named after it.
We might have been born in the Holocene, but we are living in the Anthropocene now.
How do we explain issues so big that we need to resort to geological time to describe them properly? How do we tell a story of the whole planet and everything on it?
It seems increasingly unlikely that conventional forms of storytelling and explanation are up to the job. And so, the chance to collaborate on new forms of storytelling and new ways of opening and exposing an issue appealed. What, we wondered, would a non-linear account of the Amazon look like?
We were also keen to ask the master students at the KABK some other questions. Confronted with the complexity of the issues which the Amazon raises we wanted to know –what would they make of it all?
Within Greenpeace connections between soy farming, indigenous rights and climate change seem self-evident. But would that be the case to the students? Would the construction of new roads or railways loom as large in their mental landscape as it does for us?
How would they approach issues like justice and responsibility, unencumbered by our accumulation of policy positions and ‘Greenpeace values’?
And we were also curious about their opinion of our work. How had we been telling the story and what did that say about us? We shall find out very soon.
A few months ago, political changes in Brazil meant that this project became of paramount importance. The election of President Bolsonaro underscores that there are few narratives that can make sense of our current world. A combination of legitimate grievances grounded in corruption and policy failures, combined with institutional failings have somehow combined to elect a man who is threatening to place South America’s most populous country under fascist rule.
What does his election mean for the Amazon? We can only take him at his word. His announced intentions to exploit the Amazon while forcibly integrating its Indigenous peoples would bring about ecological catastrophe and threaten the destruction of hundreds of communities.
We understand today, better than we have ever understood before the critical role the Amazon plays in our world. As a haven for biodiversity. As a home for many communities. As a key part of a climate system that provides us with a stable environment in which we can prosper.
If we as a species are to rise to the challenges, we face in the coming decade we need to be straight with ourselves. We need to explain to each other why the fate of a Brazilian forest matters to the inhabitants of The Hague, and why the emissions of Dutch coal power stations matter to the inhabitants of Brasilia. We need to face up to these challenges in a way that acknowledges and accounts for their complexities and accept the equal but differentiated
responsibilities these challenges impose on us.
So where do we start. Not as a species, but as people in this room? What can we do about this?
Well, the best answer I have ever heard to this question, is start where you are. Start with your life, your job, your diet, your investments and even your work as a designer. But remember that climate change is the kind of problem where if we all do a little bit, then we’ll only get a little bit done. So, take inspiration from the children who came together to the Malieveld. They know that individual action is not going to solve this one. They are asking for us to take steps as a society, because when we all move together, we can make big changes quickly.
So, let us start with the Netherlands. Let us make clear that it is time to quit coal and go renewable. That it is time to clean up our industry and our agriculture and make them fit for the 21st century. That it is time to lead the way in showing how we administer and tax a fossil fuel giant in the age of climate change.
Because when the ambassadors from the Netherlands, or France or Britain ask the governments of Brazil, or India or China what they are doing about climate change the first answer is always - well, what are you doing? And for too long the answer to that question has been ‘not enough’. So, let us start where we are, and use our power as citizens to reform our own society.
And then let us reach out and use what we have learned to make the case for action right around the globe. To find new friends and new allies who will help us build the green and prosperous future we all desire.
Participants of the constituent meeting of Greenpeace International gather in November 1979 on the roof patio of the Greenpeace Nederland office in Amsterdam. –
Photo by Rex Weyler (Greenpeace)
Drone photography captures deforestation in the Karipuna region. Photo by Christian Braga (Greenpeace)
Christine Gebeneter International Communication Lead ‘All Eyes on the Amazon’, Greenpeace Netherlands
ABOUT ALL EYES ON THE AMAZON AND WHY THIS MATTERS FOR THE NETHERLANDS
If I ask ‘what do forests mean to you?’, it takes only a split second for each and every one of us to come up with an image. Forests provide room for imagination, they’re a place of fairytales and myths, or to switch off our daily stressful lives and recharge batteries. In Japan there is even a tradition called ‘forest bathing’, meaning experiencing the forest through all senses, not just hiking or jogging through it. But forests are so much more and actually are of enormous importance for all our lives, because they are a climate solution. The Amazon rainforest for example stores between 80 and 120 billion tons of carbon and is a hotspot of biodiversity.
Unfortunately the largest remaining rainforest is under attack as the hunt for natural resources, such as timber, oil and minerals, or new farmland for raising cattle intensifies.
Characteristic ‘fishbone’ pattern of deforestation as seen from above near to the city of Porto Velho, Rondônia. Illustrations by Jungeun Lee made using Google Earth time lapse images.
Porto Velho
Porto Velho
Medeira River
Medeira River
Porto Velho
Porto Velho
Medeira River
Medeira River
As deforestation rates rise those responsible for the destruction are being backed by a new president who wants to open the Amazon for even more exploitation. The Amazon is also not only about trees, plants and animals. The Brazilian portion of the Amazon is home to 20 million people, comprising over 400 Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Their existence and way of life is directly linked to the Amazon rainforest making it essential for them that their lands are protected against deforestation. They are at the forefront, facing a strong and powerful logging industry and are often threatened with violence and other violations of their human rights.
One of the communities, who are standing strong against the deforestation and land grabbing happening on their lands, are the Karipuna people. We are supporting them in protecting their forest and home through a unique programme called All Eyes on the Amazon. It was initiated by Greenpeace and Hivos, and is carried out together with a large coalition of human rights and environment organisations, such as WITNESS, Global Forest Watch, Digital Democracy, the University of Maryland and many more. The aim is to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the Amazon basin in their fight against deforestation and to hold those responsible for forest destruction accountable. The programme was made possible by the contribution of the Dutch Postcode Lottery and aims to protect 8 million hectares Amazon rainforest by 2020.
Greenpeace, together with the partner organisations of the All Eyes on the Amazon programme, is creating a movement of forest defenders and climate activists and the students of this unique collaboration with the KABK Master joined in to help creating the urgently needed change. Now more than ever before we need to work all together to save the Amazon and stand with the guardians of the forest.
Niels Schrader
Co-Head Master Non Linear Narrative, Royal Academy of Art (KABK)
Lauren Alexander Tutor Graphic Deisgn
LEARNING INTERCONNECTEDNESS VIEWS FROM ABOVE TEACHING METHODS
During 2018, the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement, Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidential election and the increasingly tangible effects of global warming, meant that climate change became an ever more urgent topic. After several teaching collaborations with external partners, we at the Non Linear Narrative master programme realized that climate change seemed underprioritized within academia, and therefore reached out to Greenpeace given their consistent dedication to scientific research, political action, media dissemination and global cooperation. The complex and interdependent causes and conditions of climate change, make it one of the most challenging examples of a non-linear narrative. In September 2018, the Views from Above collaboration began with the intention to bring
important environmental case studies to the classroom environment. Our Greenpeace collaborators Christine Gebeneter and Martin Gebeneter happily connected with our vision for the teaching programme and with their help we began to unravel the vast scope of Greenpeace’s projects, which span many countries and connect global organisations and funders.
To examine the interdependence of factors contributing to deforestation, students reviewed its causes and their effects on the world climate. Areas of interest included the representation and commodification of nature, agricultural and industrial exploitation, illegal mining, government corruption and biodiversity loss. Next to the ecological rationale, students also learned to consider ethnic and socio-political circumstances like indigenous land rights and disputes, and violence against the Indigenous people of Brazil. The framework of the project allowed for roughly two months research and personal fieldwork, two months of dedicated concept development and one month of production. The final works were shown at multiple public events, a two week long exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in February 2019 and the Mag Het Licht Aan Festival in July 2019, on invitation of Hivos at Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam.
During the research phase external expertise were brought to the project through lectures by notable individuals from the environmental movement and the field of science.
Views from Above was supported by coding teachers Dan Powers and Lizzy Malcolm and media theory teacher Mijke van der Drift throughout its course.
Workshops with Greenpeace geo-data specialist Edwin Keizer, map experts and artist duo Hiryczuk / Van Oevelen
and design lector Alice Twemlow allowed students to look at environmental problems from different perspectives. An expert day at Greenpeace Netherlands headquarters in Amsterdam included talks by Hilde Stroot, head of biodiversity at Greenpeace, Emily Jacobi, founder of Digital Democracy, and Oliver Salge, Greenpeace campaigner and project leader on location in São Paulo.
Students were given the opportunity to gain expert knowledge via Greenpeace and affliated organisations, whogenerously supported them with feedback and input sessions. Student Giulia Faccin had the unique opportunity to interview André Karipuna, from the Karipuna Indigenous tribe in Brazil, when he attended the 2018 UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva. Furthermore, students were encouraged to combine findings from the Greenpeace media archive, with self-made documentation and analysis, in order to deliver a highly personal perspective on a related case study of their choice.
At the Royal Academy of Art, students are open to discovering new information about important current political and social issues. With internet-based information at their fingertips, the young generation of storytellers is generally not intimidated when asked to investigate unfamiliar topics. The ability to collect and analyse data goes hand in hand with the changing role of the designer, a multi-disciplinary author and producer, capable of deducing problems and offering both critical reflections and practical solutions.
Many of the resulting projects highlighted global interdependencies of corporations and consumer behavior, and linked examples familiar to students. The devastation in the Amazon as represented through student projects is a reflection of industrial practices, policies and consumer
behavior in Europe as much as in the Amazon. The intention with bringing a large, and admittedly overwhelming topic to the classroom was to confront the students with the interconnected network of causes and consequences of climate crisis affecting everybody. The final outcomes testify to the perseverance and diligence necessary to understand global interdependencies and risks of climate change.
The title of the project, Views from Above is a reference to the drone footage collected by Greenpeace in the context of the All Eyes on the Amazon counter surveillance strategy. In addition, the title alludes to the (post)colonial vantage point on Indigenous culture and our distant perception of climate change. We acknowledge that the intention of looking at the forest through the lens of technology, despite having good intentions, is a position which is inherently colonial and needs to approached with care.
The Master Non Linear Narrative was very happy to collaborate with Greenpeace and witness students engage with problems of planetary sustainability and social justice. We hope this initiative will help a young generation of students to recognise their opportunities and responsibilities in fighting the global climate crisis and encourage them to take a stand on social, environmental and political issues at large.
Exhibition poster design by Clara Lezla and Selina Landis.
Knowledge exchange during Views from Above teaching programme with Greenpeace Netherlands and KABK teachers, including Martin Lloyd, Charlotte van der Tak, Lizzie Malcolm, Dan Powers and Christine Gebeneter.
Patricia Bonilha Communication Manager ‘All Eyes on the Amazon’, Greenpeace Brazil
BRAZILIAN PERSPECTIVE ON WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE TERRA INDÍGENA KARIPUNA
‘The forest is where we harvest, fish, hunt and also plant. It is our Bem River ’ 1 . If we lose our territory, we lose everything. We have not been able to sleep lately because we’re afraid we will not wake up tomorrow. We know they want to steal our land’. The sad report of the young cacique André Karipuna summarizes the current reality of his people. These people already felt in their own skin how the relationship with the tapy’ynha – non-Indigenous people – can be violent: after the institutional contact with the surrounding society in the 1970s, the Karipuna People were reduced to only eight people, four of whom were children. Four decades later and the deepest heart of Brazil is still unknown to the majority of the population. Now there are
The Karipuna Indigenous Land, located in the municipalities of Nova Mamoré and Porto Velho, was recognized as an Indigenous Land by Brazilian government in 1988. – Photos by Christian Braga (Greenpeace)
André Karipuna is photographed showing the aftermath of land grabs. – Photos by Rogério Assis (Greenpeace)
58 Karipuna, but the forest people face a serious increase in violence and the criminalization of their leaders.
The purpose of this criminalisation and violence is extremely clear: in addition to the access and use of common goods, such as water, timber and ore in the traditional territories the perpetrators want to secure possession of these areas. This is in part driven by a desire to expand soy monocultures and cattle herds within indigenous lands, in ways that deplete and poison the land.
In this sense, the newly elected government of Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has reinforced a fallacious narrative in which, on one side, he affirms that the natives are ‘ordinary people’ who desire the benefits of a ‘developed’ society and deserve to be integrated the society. On the other side, there is the accusation that they have too much land and are unproductive, since they are not incorporated into the commodities market. The quick and shallow conclusion of this thinking is that Indigenous People must integrate with the surrounding society and turn their lands over to the market.
Complementing this conclusion, the new president is committed to making the current legislation on gun ownership more flexible. This will mean land grabbers will have the right to be armed in the areas which are in conflict.
It is worth remembering that, according to the NGO Global Witness, in 2017 Brazil was the country where the most human rights defenders were killed. There were 57 murders in the country, from a total of 207 activists killed in 22 countries.
Another worrying fact is the 13,7% increase in deforestation in the Amazon between August 2017 and July 2018 2 . In just the Karipuna Indigenous Land 10.463 hectares of forests have been destroyed since 1988 3 , with more than 80%
of this destruction occurring between 2015 and 2018. It is evident that the most privileged sectors of Brazilian ruralism feel empowered and authorised by institutional powers to decimate secular lifestyles, characterized by different ways of living, eating, relating, healing and reproducing. Dependent on the standing forest, the very existence of Indigenous Peoples is threatened.
The Karipuna, one of the 305 Indigenous Peoples living in the Brazilian territory (not counting the more than 100 groups of Indigenous People living in voluntary isolation), despite all their vulnerability, reiterate that they will resist. Just as they have been doing for the last 518 years.
But for this resistance to be real it is essential that Brazilian society and international organisations effectively support the First Nations of Brazil. We still have much to learn from them about the harmonious coexistence with the forest and nature.
1 Bem Viver is a philosophy that is based on a reciprocal relationships between people and between people and nature. It prioritizes life and harmony over profits. It is built from the ancestral wisdom of the Latin American Indigenous Peoples.
2 According to the National Institute of Space Research (INPE).
3 According to official data from the Amazon Deforestation Calculation Programme (Prodes) and Greenpeace geoprocessing analyzes. This is the highest increase in the last decade and represents a total area of 7.900 km2, equivalent to 987.500 soccer fields or 5,2 times the city of São Paulo.
Mijke van der Drift Tutor Media Theory Lab
NETWORKS, INFRINGEMENTS AND COLLECTIVE ENVIRONMENTS
A striking observation about Eurocentric thought is that nature is seen as one and cultures as many, floating on top of this homogenized ‘nature’. 1 The question in this framing is how ‘different cultures’ can relate to each other, while their relation to nature remains one of unquestioned access. In other ways of thinking, for instance by the Runa living in the Ecuadorian Amazon, nature is seen as multiplicity and human ways of living are merely one of the many different forms that are entangled in larger patterns. In this view connection between forms of life is through understanding the logic that a specific life form brings to the table. A scarecrow to keep parrots away from corn fields is drawn as a hawk such as a parrot would perceive it. Runa can warn you that in the forest you need to sleep with your face up, in case a puma passes by. Face up you signal that you are capable of returning the hunter’s gaze, face down you are like prey. The Runa
have deep and complex relationships with various forms of life, including the dead, while dead animals and ancestors retain connections as abstractions of present life forms. This collective environment ensures an interplay between forms of life that is based on interactions that require interpretation. Each logic emerges from a form and connection is possible by understanding when one is at a fringe of someone else’s form. Centralising one’s mode of acting is not the point: the idea is not to gain mastery or dominance over, but instead to understand what it means to live with.
In Euro-American models of interaction the reverse view can be understood to be the case. Action emerges from intention and the strives for the power to produce changes and orderings in the world. This model emphasises action as translation of proclamations. Sometimes orderings become institutionalised and create vast networks of fixed activities. Sea containers are one such standardised mode of action that functions to make networks of distribution. 2 These networks demand that ships have certain sizes and are compatible with sea cranes to unload, which consequently have a major impact on how unloading of vessels is structured. A crew of two unloads in rotating shifts of four hours empty a ship in two days. Efficiency here can be understood as the imposition of an activity that claims not only design, and the logistics of transport but also labour time and organisation. Weak unions make workers pliable to managerial demands. The logic of efficiency forces a network in a certain way of functioning, coming with demands on space, imposes time scales, and forms human action into a specified grid. The logic of efficiency turns different activities in problems to be solved. Efficiency is a dominating cultural logic that superimposes itself as network on a myriad of relations that merge around
the logic of the form, in this case the sea container in times of neoliberalism.
The logics emerging from within technologies have effects upon the environments that they are implemented in. Free trade can be understood as the demand for access to environments to create greater networks that operate with a single field of power. This logic of logistics and access finds origin in the North Atlantic slave trade. 3 People were pressed into the logic of the cheapest available labour force to repopulate the colonies following the collapse and genocide upon colonised indigenous nations in the Americas. Such commodification entails the brutal dehumanisation of the slaves and the desensitisation of the slave traders. Life became priced and disposable in order to sustain and expand a plantation economy. This political economic programme seeks the transformation of life into wealth that can be transferred up the chain of the economic hierarchy. Colonial efficiency transforms people to catalyse wealth upwards. This political economic programme functions by creating networks of extraction: slavery requires forts on the West Coast of Africa, merchandise, markets in the colonies, and a system of ships, ports, money, insurance, police, judiciary and a plantation economy. Colonisation is partly the transformation of life worlds into exploitable lands, extractable resources, and disposable peoples. 4 Desensitisation of the colonisers enables that the destruction of life, environments, and relationships is not perceived as loss. These networks reinforce the idea that cultures are separate, and land is something to be opened for extraction and exploitation. 5 The idea that land comes with a logic of life is preposterous in this world view. This means also that the different ways of living found in lands, by critters
and plants cannot be taken into account as relevant in the decision-making process of political economic activity. The statements of Brazil’s current president Bolsonaro that protection of the Amazon would infringe upon Brazil’s sovereignty can be understood in this modus of thinking. 6 That the land itself has already made a claim to its diverse forms of life, which includes human life, is not a perspective that can enter the conversation, because the logic of efficient extraction to pursue ‘economic growth’ does not allow such considerations. Environments are not seen as collective, but open to infringements. Infringements are structured by managerial power to make networks of extraction that spread responsibilities for the decisions to persons or groups in demarcated tasks. A network of extraction is enabled by systematic individual acts. It is not only banalities of administration that keep it going, but also distributed cruelty, whether performed by slave traders, violent police forces, judiciary, mercenaries, or management. 7 The network is an interlinked series of activities, where the environment is a collection of life forms.
The remark needs to be made that collectives are not immune to becoming complicit in exploitation. 8 However, the idea that a world consists of multiple interacting logics seems a fruitful way to counter the singular modus of efficient extraction, which functions to transform life into unequally distributed wealth. Space for interactions of forms of life bars efficient superimposition of technologies of extraction. The ethical balance needs to shift from a subservience to the singular logic of commodification to the problematic and oftentimes overwhelmingly complex interactions of various life forms. While networks make that the Amazon is not just ‘over there’, but also already ‘over here’.
Panorama, the village of the Karipuna indigenous people, is located at the margins of the Jaci Paraná River.
– Photo by Rogério Assis (Greenpeace)
To preserve multiplicity of life forms means to halt networks that enable extraction. These networks can be understood as systems that strive for economic growth and shrink protections to individual rights rather than enabling spaces for mutual inclusion between collectives, diversity of the natural world and different cultural logics. 9 It means that ceasing the impoverishment of the environment and the people that live in it needs ending of a logic of efficiency of extraction that finds shape through the single logic of transferable wealth.
Thinking about the interaction of species the Hawaiian crow comes to mind. Their life world disappeared, not because they were directly extinguished, but because the amount of forest shrunk and thereby the amount of different species and members of each species. There are only a few of these crows left in captivity. 10 There is a story about a single crow, left behind in a cage, mournfully calling kiaw in all different tones, calling its disappeared friends. Instead of keeping the cage closed, the door could have been opened, to enable new connections with other crows, finding lost friends, or other species. Nurturing variety and interaction between logics can become a key for a renewed bonding with the world. Collective logics make such a perspective possible. Single solutions, even with the best intentions, return to a logic of singular imposition and thereby pressing different forms of life to the fringes of the singular form. Instead, it can be learned from the Runa that interactions consist in successfully shifting form and embracing multiple logics to entangle lives with each other.
1 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2013).
2 Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, England: MIT Press, 2005).
3 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
4 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest (Ion) of Blackness toward the End of the World’, The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97; Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1999).
5 The work of John Locke is exemplary to understand the inside account of desensitizing as a modus of exploitation.
6 Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Analysis – How Brazil’s Bolsonaro Threatens the Planet’, Washington Post, 19 October 2019, https:// www.washingtonpost. com/world/2018/10/19/ how-brazils-bolsonarothreatens-planet/.
7 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, ‘No-Bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence’, Griffith Law Review 18, no. 2 (2009): 212–236; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin, 2006); LaDuke, All Our Relations; Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics.
8 Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
9 See for instance Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
10 Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Artist duo Elodie Hiryczuk and Sjoerd van Oevelen led a workshop which included printing a map of the Brazilian Amazon on large scale.
– Photos by Elodie Hiryczuk
Edwin Keizer, geo-data specialist at Greenpeace gave a lecture about how deforestation is monitored using methods of satellite imagery analysis.
Giulia Faccin
PANORAMA
12:22 min HD video projection
Giulia Faccin skillfully combines interview material with André Karipuna (leader of the Karipuna tribe), deforestation experts as well as drone footage gathered by Greenpeace Netherlands to create a mini documentary registering the devastation occurring on the land of the indigenous Karipuna tribe in Rondônia, Brazil. André Karipuna describes the loss of habitat in his region, but also his disappointment with the Brazilian government who are not managing to protect Indigenous people nor precious nature, and are rather choosing for profits and industry development.
Kert Viiart
UMM... HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?
8:18 min HD video
Kert Viiart is intrigued by the mass production of palm oil in global rain forests as an example of one of the most ubiquitous and damaging byproducts of global capitalism. Since palm oil exists in almost all food and cosmetic products, Viiart takes the viewer on a journey to discover the industries’ products and marketing strategies.
Emma Verhoven
GUARDIANS
5:03 min video and printed posters
Emma Verhoeven has gathered a large collection of images, which represent the Indigenous people of the Amazon from historical archives, Greenpeace media sources, Western and Brazilian media. Using a vibrant video collage she explores her fascination with the different conflicting roles or identities which Indigenous people could be associated with, depending on who is creating images of them.
Block QOL-T-169, owned by Russian company Rosneft in the Solimöes basin in Amazonas and Santa Florestal Maria logging site which has decertified carbon credit programme in Mato Grosso
Hattie Wade
NATURE AS CAPITAL - THE SKY IS THE LIMIT
Engraved wood hanging installation and 7:11 min HD video
Hattie Wade is investigating through her mobile sculpture how Brazilian nature is turned into a commodity, commonly owned and exploited by foreign stakeholders. Using reports of global investment firms like Harvard Endowment Fund. During her research Wade has created a series of intricate diagrams, which explain complex connections between Western investment firms and their ownership and speculation on land, gas and carbon in the Amazon region. She has chosen to bring seemingly abstract unrelated networks to life in order to expose the hidden relations of the agents of deforestation.
THE LABOUR NAMED DEFORESTATION
Contemporary slavery is a booming business in the Brazilian Amazon. Cyan Bae discovered that many industries such as logging, cattle ranching and coffee cultivation are all reliant on slave labour due to its remote locations and severe working conditions. Despite Brazil’s colonial trauma around the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, only an estimated 50.000 people have managed to be rescued from this new type of slavery since 1995. For the exhibition, Bae has created an interactive visual mapping sourced from media related articles depicting slavery rescues over the last three years.
Felix Meerman
SPIX’S MACAW
3:23 min HD video
Felix Meerman focuses in his video work on the topic of biodiversity, in particular the extinction of the Spix’s Macaw (little blue macaw) parrot. It’s extinction is the result of habitat destruction following 100 years of intensive burning, logging and grazing in the North-East of Brazil. Similar to the captive breeding programme of zoologists, Meerman tries to preserve the Macaw species by recreating a virtual copy of the bird’s natural territory.
Lila Steinkampf
FINANCING DEFORESTATION FROM THE NETHERLANDS
Lila Steinkampf’s work departs from her research into largescale railway infrastructures such as the Ferrograo project in Northern Brazil, which pose serious threats to the ecological balance of the Amazon rainforest. The planned railway routes costing billions of dollars will provide transport for the grain, soy and timber industries and are funded by both Brazilian and international cash flows. Steinkampf has created an interactive website which allows the viewer to compare and connect the situation in the Brazilian Amazon to companies and governmental institutions in the Netherlands.
Interactive website
2000 people, mainly gold miners and their families, were protesting for better working conditions in the Serra Pelada gold mine
can a former oppressor feel oppressed?
Serra
SERRA PELADA, BRASILIA
Two channel slide projection
Mauro Tosarelli’s parents lived and worked in Brazil during the 1980’s when he was a young boy. His Italian born parents worked as educators and medical staff during the socialist period in Brazil. Using this parent’s archival photographs collected during that period, documenting labour conditions, social conditions and movements in the rural countryside, Tosarelli contrasts the different time periods and tries to draw visual conclusions about how capitalism has affected the rainforest.
built in the Northern part of the Xingu River in Pará
Belo Monte Dam
Cristina Lavosi
3.678 HOUSEHOLDS – RECOGNISING DISPLACED WOMEN OF THE BELO MONTE DAM
Textile tapestry, 0,85 m x 7 m
In her exhibition contribution, Cristina Lavosi draws attention to the environmental effects of the Belo Monte Dam construction in the northern part of the Xingu River. During the twenty-year building period, the dam has caused massive human rights violations and the forced displacement of thousands of villagers. Lavosi has created a textile tapestry, which illustrates the vast number of displaced civilians and includes interview-based accounts of their personal stories.
LETTER IDEOPHONE TYPE MEANING EXAMPLE
G Gyawng Indigenous Ideophone Sad groaning of a tree falling because it’s being chopped.
Grooh Ideophone The chaos of multi species coherence inspired by the sounds of animals blended with city noise.
Glawn Ideophone The sound of an excited cat in anticipation of drinking water.
As it falls, it cries. Haven’t you heard? Gjawwwŋ it cries when someone chops a big tree.
You should go for a walk at night and enjoy the grooh around you.
My cat started going glawn the moment she saw me.
H Hi Indigenous Ideophone The sound of thunder laughing. You can hear the thunder laughing hi hi hi hi hi
Hum Ideophone The sound of helpless leaves being blown by a leaf blower.
I Iyak Ideophone Mourning crows, cawing for the loss of a member of the species.
K Kukuli Indigenous Ideophone
The sad sound of a bird flying by itself.
Kwig Ideophone Happy birds singing in spite of human noise pollution.
M Matso Indigenous Ideophone The way arms hug the body, or the way wings of a bird flap close to its body after flapping open and away from the body while flying
P Piriya Indigenous Ideophone The sound of the kaka kwiling bird, also known as the tapya kwiling (portending kwiling), crying as a warning to people that someone in their midst is about to die.
R Ruhmb Ideophone The rhythm of rain disrupted by the sound of an angry heater.
S Splash Ideophone Sudden reminder of the continuity of existence between humans and nonhumans represented by the sound of an object falling in water.
Skiwing Ideophone The sound of birds joining ringing bells.
Skit Ideophone The warm feeling of being part of busy ecosystem represented by the sounds of small birds, pigeons, people and the hustle of the city.
The wind was too strong yesterday, people almost started Igoing hum.
I woke up to a sad iyak this morning.
kukuliiiiii kukuliiii kukuliii it sings sadly while flying
You should be more like these birds, they wig and they don’t care.
It's going to make the leg go matso! Look it's going matso!
The bird was warning us, piriya piriya.
There’s always going to be a rhumb somewhere when things are going too smooth.
A walk a nature can be a really refreshing splash.
Everyone was happy yesterday, even the birds were skiwing.
nothing feels better than sitting outside and hearing skit skit all around you.
Claude Nassar
THE MISSING LINK
Printed dictionary and audio installation
Inspired by site-specific Indigenous languages of the Amazon and how words and expressions exist to describe nature, Claude Nassar has developed an audio dictionary for the Anthropocene. By combining human experience of nature in an urban context, Nassar has created his own set of definitions, conditions and sayings to represent the sounds of our intertwined existence.
Photograph from the Greenpeace archive of the Tapajos river basin, Pará
Jean-Baptiste Castel and Astrid Feringa
THIS IS NOT THE AMAZON
4:53 min HD video
Is the representation of nature through media and entertainment more real to us than nature itself? Astrid Feringa and Jean-Baptiste Castel have created a 3D walk-through video in an environment that resembles a tropical rainforest. The video shows how the concept of wilderness is constructed through different perspectives and economies, simulated over and over again into a simulacrum – an image that may never have existed.
Alice Twemlow Lector Design, Royal Academy of Art (KABK)
‘CONFLICTING DEFINITIONS OF KEY TERMS’: AN ECOLOGICAL PROTEST AT THE INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE
IN ASPEN, 1970–1971
It was a perfect June evening in Aspen, a former silver mining town 8.000 feet up in the Rockies. As the sun began to dip behind the snow-capped mountains on this first day of the 1970 International Design Conference at Aspen (IDCA), a group gathered for a cocktail party. The men were dressed in plaid jackets and ties and their hair, if they still had any,
was close-cropped and gray. Their wives, who had been offered a reduced conference fee, so that the weeklong conference might be combined with a family vacation, wore cocktail dresses, large sunglasses and pearls, and their hair, curled and set, barely moved in the breeze that ruffled the nearby aspen trees.
Drinks were set out on the terrace of one of the modernist houses in the Aspen Meadows complex designed by Herbert Bayer. The Austrian émigré and consultant to Container Corporation of America, who had moved to Aspen in 1946, was there, dapper in his suit and cravat, suntanned and still handsome at 70. Also sipping gimlets were other board members in charge of the IDCA: Saul Bass, the Los Angeles-based graphic designer; Eliot Noyes, design director at IBM and president of IDCA since 1965; and George Nelson, design director at the high-end office furniture firm Herman Miller. These men had been trained as artists and architects, but had helped to define the American graphic and industrial design professions in the 1940s and 1950s. Their careers had flourished in the postwar period of economic expansion, and were tied to the rise of a consumer society. Now in middle age, they held prominent positions within both the professional design community and the flagship corporations of the day. As they laughed, clinked glasses, and patted one another on the back in collegial amiability, it certainly looked as if these representatives of the American design elite were enjoying the fruits of their labors.
Meanwhile, in the meadow beyond this midsummer cocktail party for the cognoscenti of modernist American design, a very different scenario was taking shape. Milling about outside a big white concert tent, designed by Bayer, where the conference would be held, were student designers
and architects, some of their young teachers, and a number of art and environmental action groups, many from Berkeley, California, who had made the 1.000-odd-mile journey to Colorado in chartered buses. With their waist-length hair, beards, open-necked shirts, bandanas and jean jackets, these groups signaled both their adherence to an alternative lifestyle and set of values (for which Berkeley was the unofficial American capital) and their distance from the largely East Coast conference organisers.
Among the groups arriving were members of the San Francisco media collective Ant Farm, who, by 1970, were well known for their advocacy of a nomadic lifestyle, their use of inflatable structures as the setting for free-form architectural performances, and their experiments with video as a vehicle for critique. In a biographical statement Ant Farm had characterised themselves as ‘an extended family … of environmentalists, artists, designers, builders, actors, cooks, lifers and an inflatable named Frank; war babies, television children, Rod & Custom subscribers, university trained media freaks and hippies interested in balancing the environment by total transformation of existing social and economic systems.’ 1
Since the theme of the conference this year was ‘Environment by Design,’ several representatives of environmental action groups were also gathering, invited by Sim Van der Ryn, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of the Farallones Institute, a research center for studying environmentally sound building and design, and lowtechnology solutions to waste management. Among those also invited by Van der Ryn were: Michael Doyle, founder of the Environmental Workshop in San Francisco; the People’s
Architecture Group; Steve Baer, the Albuquerque solar energy enthusiast who founded Zomeworks and developed many of the housing structures for communes such as Drop City and Manara Nueva; and Cliff Humphrey, founder of Ecology Action, originator of the first drop-off recycling center in the US, whose Berkeley commune, known for smashing and burying cars, had just been featured in a New York Times magazine cover story. The cover image showed Humphrey pushing a bandaged globe in a baby stroller. 2
There was a third group, too, that was neither at the cocktail party nor among the festival-like gathering in the meadow. This group included Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher and sociologist, and the architect Jean Aubert. They were members of Utopie, a Paris-based collective of thinkers and architects that, between 1966 and 1970, had been engaged in radical leftist critique. In fact, this third contingent comprised thirteen special guests, who would become known collectively at the conference as the FrenchGroup, and had been selected by industrial designer Roger Tallon.
Here were three very different tribes, each with its own design principles, conception of what the environment meant in relation to design, and critical methods. To the IDCA board, design was a problem-solving activity in the service of industry – albeit with roots in architecture and the fine arts. In the environmentalists’ and students’ view, designers needed to claim responsibility for the repercussions of their activities, and to understand design in terms of interconnected systems and natural resources. And the French Group? Well, they objected to both conceptions, perceiving the gathering at Aspen to be a ‘Disneyland of Environment and Design’ and, indeed, the ‘entire theory of Design and Environment’ as constituting a ‘generalised Utopia … produced by a capitalist
system that assumes the appearance of a second nature, in order to survive and perpetuate itself under the pretext of nature.’ With such divergent worldviews and reference bases at play, and the prospect of a week in one another’s company, an ideological collision of some significance seemed likely.
Sure enough, as the June week wore on, tensions mounted between members of the American liberal design establishment and the eclectic assortment of environmentalists, design and architecture students on the one hand, and the French delegation on the other. The new arrivals to the conference were coming from very different places, both geographically and ideologically. But, in combination, their protests, which became evident during the event, targeted what the dissenters saw as the conference’s flimsy grasp of pressing environmental issues, its lack of political engagement, its hubristic belief in design’s power to solve social problems, and its outmoded non-participatory format. […]
The conference’s closing session centered on voting for a series of resolutions formulated by the protestors that criticised the intellectual and moral limitations of the conference content, the conference as a designed entity, and the design profession itself.
The French Group’s contribution to the session was a statement written by Baudrillard that explained the group’s refusal to participate in the regular conference proceedings. 3 In their view, essential matters concerning the social and political status of design were not being addressed. ‘In these circumstances,’ the statement began, ‘any participation could not but reinforce the ambiguity and the complicity of silence which hangs over this meeting.’ 4
Baudrillard’s text, read aloud at the closing session by the geographer André Fischer, openly dismissed the
conference’s theme of ‘Environment by Design.’ It also rejected the more widespread interest in environmental issues, as an opiate concocted by the capitalist system to unify a ‘disintegrating society.’ 5 Baudrillard posited that both the conference theme and the wider crusade currently preoccupying the nation simply diverted attention and energy toward ‘a boy-scout idealism with a naive euphoria in a hygienic nature,’ and away from the real social and political problems of the day such as class discrimination, the Vietnam War, and neo-imperialistic conflicts. The new focus on pollution, Baudrillard pointed out, was not merely about protecting flora and fauna, but about the establishment seeking to protect itself from the polluting influence of communism, immigration, and disorder. 6
Far from espousing environmentalism, then, Baudrillard contended that it was a ruse of government to maintain the very economy that threatened the environment. He may have been referring to Earth Day, first celebrated in April 1970 and founded by Senator Gaylord Nelson, a liberal democrat from Wisconsin. As historian Felicity Scott notes, it had ‘set out to repackage environmental concerns for the general public by decoupling questions of ecology from more radical elements and bringing the movement into alignment with those in Congress pursuing environmental regulations. With re-election campaigns in the works, a cynical ‘war on pollution’ had been added to those already launched through the media on poverty and hunger.’ 7 Baudrillard identified an insidious ‘therapeutic mythology’ at work, which framed society as being ill, in order that a cure might be offered. He castigated designers, ‘who are acting like medicine-men towards this ill society,’ for their complicity in such myth-making, in this semantic slippage between the realms of military defense,
the environment, and society. 8
This statement, however powerful, did not have much impact at the conference. French journalist Gilles de Bure reported that ‘the text was greeted with polite applause. Neither interrupted, nor discussed, it provoked a reaction of surprise at the most elementary level. … One may wonder if, in the end, the text by Jean Baudrillard had hit home at all, other than with the French group, which had accepted it even before he wrote it?’ 9
Reflecting on what occurred at Aspen in 1970, Baudrillard identified yet another communicative rupture between his own Utopie collective and the Californian environmental activists – one based on national identity: ‘This “counterculture” was foreign to us. We were very “French,” therefore very “metaphysical,” a French metaphysics of revolt, of insubordination, while the counter culture that expressed itself in Aspen was largely American.’ When he tried to bring back to France something of the ‘vigor’ of the American movement, he found there was a translation barrier: ‘There was no way to metabolise this contribution in a French context dominated by the “politico-careerist” New Left.’ 10
Despite Baudrillard’s retrospective enthusiasm for the Aspen ‘moment,’ he found the physical setting of the conference to be fundamentally at odds with the seriousness of the issue at stake, referring to Aspen as ‘the Disneyland of environment and design,’ and drawing attention to the fact that ‘we are speaking … about apocalypse in a magic ambiance.’ 11 Cora Walker had also highlighted the surreally removed location of the conference, telling the crowd: ‘When asked if I’d ever been to Aspen before, I had to respond that I’d never even heard of Aspen before.’ 12 The high-altitude resort of Aspen, which had once been seen as the ideal
setting for designers to gain critical distance from their practices, was now being criticised for its physical and symbolic remoteness from the social problems they should be engaging with.
The students’ resolutions, read aloud after the coffee break by Michael Doyle, shared some of the same goals as the French Group’s statement. The resolutions called for, among other things, the withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia and an end to the draft, the legalisation of abortion, the restoration of land to Native American Indians, and the end of government persecution of ‘Blacks, Mexican-Americans, longhairs, homosexuals, and women.’ 13 But it was the final point of the document that was the most contentious: it asked that designers attending the conference ‘refuse to create structures, advertisements, products, and develop ideas whose primary purpose is to sell materials for the sole purpose of creating profit,’ stating that ‘This attitude is a destructive force in our society.’ 14 Striking at the core of the design profession, as it was represented by the conference board, this resolution also pointed to the contradiction in the conference’s environmental theme being discussed – and, indeed, sponsored – by those deeply implicated, through their day-to-day transactions, in harming the environment.
Stewart Udall, who had been Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969, observed in his keynote speech that Walter Paepcke ‘would be amused in 1970, if he were here, to realise that the container industry is in trouble, and on the defensive with the environment movement.’ 15 In 1970, possibly under pressure from a mounting environmental movement, the firm that Paepcke had founded, Container Corporation of America, sponsored a contest to create a design that would symbolise the recycling process, and would be used
to identify packages made from recycled and recyclable fibers. Gary Anderson, a graduate student at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, won the contest, which was judged during IDCA 1970, with his design based on the Möbius strip, and was awarded a tuition scholarship of $2.500.
Very few of the IDCA board members and speakers at the 1970 conference could claim to work for companies whose main goal was not to ‘sell materials for the sole purpose of creating profit,’ and even fewer worked for companies with environmentally responsible practices. The corporate contributors included Alcoa, Coca-Cola Company, Ford Motor Company, IBM, and Mobil Oil, all well known for their resource-heavy manufacturing and distribution processes. 16
After reading the resolutions aloud, Doyle hectored the conference attendees into voting on whether or not to adopt them. Reyner Banham, The British design critic, who had been charged with chairing this final session, noted: ‘It immediately became clear that the conference was liable to polarise into irreconcilable factions and split as the tensions of the week came to the surface.’ 17 At the end of the session, by Banham’s reckoning, only half the conferees remained. ‘I shall not soon forget the hostility vibes that were coming up from the floor,’ he wrote, ‘nor how uptight the students could get the moment they thought they weren’t getting their own way.’ 18
As moderator of the closing session, the 48-year-old Banham found himself in an awkward position: as an educator and sympathiser with student sit-ins that had taken place in London in the last two years, he wanted to give the students and environmentalists airtime. Less than a decade before
this, students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, had invited Banham to give lectures for their own alternative course, which they were running concurrently with the official degree programme. By 1970, however, he was an officially appointed professor at the college’s newly formed School of Environmental Studies. Furthermore, as an advisor to the IDCA board, a prior conference chairman, the editor of The Aspen Papers, and a close friend of Noyes, he also felt loyalty toward the conference organisers against whom the protests were directed. Ultimately, Banham adhered to the consensusbuilding tendency that had characterised IDCA to date. By contrast, the writer Tony Cohan, who traveled to the conference with the California environmentalists, advocated ‘dissensus,’ calling for a new conference format in which ‘the thrust would have been away from language and toward action encounter, away from fruitless attempts at consensus and toward forms that incorporate conflict.’ 19
The question of how to engage with, and how to resist, the liberal establishment preoccupied the earnest and impassioned students at the Aspen conference, just as it did students more generally in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was clear, however, that new forms of resistance were necessary; mere criticism as it was conventionally practiced in a written form was no longer suited to the task. During a meeting arranged by the student attendees of IDCA 1969, to which they had invited some of the speakers (including Nelson), discussion had turned to the widely publicised attempt to create a public park in Berkeley, and whether or not to work with the establishment, to become a part of it, try to destroy it, or to create a new establishment. The report of the meeting records: ‘Finally one student in anger said,
“You can’t write a letter to a vending machine; you have to kick it!” Again there was applause.’ 20
1 Ant Farm, biography, Design Quarterly 78/79 (1970), Special Double Issue on Conceptual Architecture, 10.
2 Steven Roberts, ‘The Better Earth: A Report on Ecology Action, a Brash, Activist, Radical Group Fighting for a Better Environment’, The New York Times Magazine, March 29, 1970, 8.
3 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Statement Made by the French Group’, Speakers’ Papers, IDCA 1970, International Design Conference in Aspen Records 1949–2006, 2007.M.7, Series 1, Box 28, Fol. 4–6, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 4 5 6 Ibid.
7 Felicity Scott, Architecture or Technoutopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 238.
8 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Statement Made by the French Group’, Speakers’ Papers, IDCA 1970, International Design Conference in Aspen
Records 1949–2006, 2007.M.7, Series 1, Box 28, Fol. 4–6, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
9 Gilles de Bure, C.R.É.É., no. 6 (November/December 1970), trans. Patricia Chen for Rosa B (2013).
10 Jean Baudrillard, interview with Jean-Louis Violeau, May 1997, in Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred, 18.
11 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Statement Made by the French Group’, Speakers’ Papers, IDCA 1970, International Design Conference in Aspen Records 1949–2006, 2007.M.7, Series 1, Box 28, Fol. 4–6, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
12 IDCA ’70, dir. Noyes and Weill.
13 Letter from Reyner Banham to his wife, Mary, June 19, 1970.
14 ‘Resolutions by those attending the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen, Friday, June 19, 1970, in recognition of our national—social—physical environment’.
15 Stewart Udall, Speakers’ Papers, IDCA 1970, International Design Conference in Aspen Records 1949–2006, 2007.M.7, Series 1, Box 28, Fol. 4–6, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
16 Administrative and financial records, IDCA 1970, International Design Conference in Aspen Records 1949–2006, 2007.M.7, Series 1, Box 26, Fol. 1–5, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
17 Letter from Reyner Banham to his wife, Mary, June19, 1970.
18 Ibid.
19 Tony Cohan, ‘Questions about Approach Plague Aspen’, Progressive Architecture, August 1970, 39.
20 Student Handbook, IDCA 1970, International Design Conference in Aspen Records 1949–2006, 2007.M.7, Series 1, Box 28, Fol. 8, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Views from Above festive opening at the main gallery of the Academy Gallery at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague took place on the 9th of February 2019.
Alice Twemlow (left) Lector Design, KABK speaking at the Views from Above opening. Photographed above is Anna Schoemakers, executive director of Greenpeace Netherlands with Marieke Schoenmakers, director of KABK.
Views from Above Networks, Colonial Vision and Indigenous Resistance in the Brazilian Amazon
A project collaboration between the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and Greenpeace Netherlands
Project participants
Cyan Bae, Jean-Baptiste Castel, Giulia Faccin, Astrid Feringa, Cristina Lavosi, Felix Meermann, Claude Nassar, Lila Steinkampf, Mauro Tosarelli, Emma Verhoeven, Kert Viiart and Hattie Wade
Concept
Lauren Alexander and Niels Schrader
Tutoring and exhibition curation
Lauren Alexander, Mijke van der Drift, Lizzie Malcolm, Dan Powers and Niels Schrader from KABK and Christine Gebeneter and Martin Lloyd from Greenpeace
Guest teachers
Hiryczuk / Van Oevelen, Edwin Keizer and Alice Twemlow
Exhibition
Exhibition design
Nanneke Boomgaard, Bianca Meilof and Judy Wetters
Signage and communication design
Selina Landis and Clara Lezla
Production
Simcha van Helden, Lizzy Kok and Liselotte Vandikkelen
black/white FSC Logo
Publication
Main editors
Lauren Alexander and Niels Schrader
Texts
Lauren Alexander, Patricia Bonilha, Mijke van der Drift, Christine Gebeneter, Martin Lloyd, Anna Schoemakers, Marieke Schoenmakers, Niels Schrader and Alice Twemlow
Copy editing Maria Dzodan
Design Jungeun Lee
Photography
Roel Backaert, Sofia de Benedictis and Elodie Hiryczuk
Typeface
FoundersGrotesk, Happy Times at the IKOB and VFA Sans
Paper
Freelife Vellum white
Printing Robstolk, Amsterdam
Binding Boekbinderij Patist, Den Dolder
Special thanks to Jacqueline van As, Nienke van Beers, Ingrid Grünwald, Elodie Hiryczuk & Sjoerd van Oevelen Emily Jacobi, André Karipuna, Edwin Keizer, Pascal de Man, Oliver Salge, Marieke Schoenmakers, Hilde Stroot, Charlotte van der Tak and Hélène Webers
Disclaimer
All rights reserved. Kindly contact the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague regarding any form of use or reproduction of photographs and any material in this publication. Although every effort has been made to find the copyright holders of all the illustrations used, this proved impossible in some cases. Interested parties are requested to contact the publisher.
ISBN 978-90-72600-51-6
© 2019
Print run
400
Royal Academy of Art Graphic Design Department Prinsessegracht 4 2514 AN The Hague
The Netherlands
Greenpeace Netherlands NDSM-Plein 32 1033 WB Amsterdam
The Netherlands
PROJECT LOCATIONS
1 Protected Karipuna tribe lands in Rondônia, Panorama by Giulia Faccin
2 Palm oil plantations in Pará, Um… Have You Seen This? by Kert Viiart
3 FUNAI, National Indian Foundation in Manaus, Guardians by Emma Verhoeven
4 Block QOL-T-169, owned by Russian company Rosneft in the Solimöes basin in Amazonas and Santa Florestal Maria logging site which has decertified carbon credit programme in Mato Grosso, Nature as Capital – The Sky is the Limit by Hattie Wade
5 Many enslaved workers were rescued in São Félix do Xingu, Pará, The Labour Named Deforestation by Cyan Bae
6 The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Birds of Brazil project protects wild parrots in Manaus, Spix’s Macaw by Felix Meerman
7 Grain railway Ferrogrão connects the port at Mirituba in Pará to soy producing Mato Grosso, Financing Deforestation from the Netherlands by Lila Steinkampf
8 Serra Pelada Gold Mine in Parà, Serra Pelada, Brasilia by Mauro Tosarelli
9 Belo Monte Dam built in the Northern part of the Xingu River in Pará, 3678 households –Recognising Displaced Women of the Belo Monte Dam by Cristina Lavosi
10 Quechua speaking tribes on Brazil and Peru’s borders, The Missing Link by Claude Nassar
11 Photograph from the Greenpeace archive of the Tapajos river basin, Pará, This Is Not the Amazon by Astrid Feringa and Jean-Baptiste Castel
Views from Above is a project collaboration between the Master Non Linear Narrative at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and Greenpeace Netherlands.
The project aims to contribute to the contemporary discussion on climate change by offering narrations and visualisations of issues related to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, which have broad globally interconnected implications.
ISBN 978-90-72600-51-6