The jungle

“The jungle is very big, no animal needs to worry or care… for everyone to have a nest, they all have to lend a hand”

Mauricio Gatti, In the Jungle There Is Much To Do, 1971

Caring for jungles, forests and waters is a collective, ancestral and intergenerational practice. For many, nature and animals are not external entities, they are family: brothers and sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers and it is they, in their generous abundance and wisdom, who care for the wellbeing of everyone. Mauricio Gatti’s book In the Jungle There Is Much To Do, begins with the acknowledgement of the richness and interspecies solidarity of the jungle. But all is not well. There are those who want to extract, exploit and imprison for the benefit of a select few. Multiple worlds have been lost in this impulse to possess, to incarcerate, to always want more, to own others. The grand museums of the world were built upon those deaths, exhibiting the pieces of those broken lives as trophies of their distinction, of their culture. How to remember all that which was not allowed to exist? How to tell the stories of those other experiences, whose mere existence is struggle? There are those who do not forget and resist. Their ancestral sounds, those of the birds, animals, rivers and of violently extracted stones sing, they thunder, over cities and mountains. Their libraries are the land. Welcome to a popular library of the pluriverse, an antimuseum where volcanoes and pumas roar, and remind us that the jungle is life.

María Berríos, Curator