Sebastião Salgado has spent seven years photographing the great green lung of the planet. A paradise without disease, "only malaria, which the Italian Salesians brought from Africa and which has been the most important religious contribution to the area", quips the Brazilian photographer, and without repression: "It has incredible spaces to live , to walk, to circulate, there are no conflicts. And religions are relative, there are groups that believe in leaders and others don't, there is freedom, tranquility. Once, when I was photographing a group of jumping children, I asked a girl who worked with me, a linguist, who knew the language of that village of 400 people, to tell the children's mother if she could to calm down, and he answered me: 'Sebastião, they don't have repression, she doesn't know how to say no to her children, everyone does what they want around here'. And it's fantastic." A paradise threatened by the years of Jair Bolsonaro - there were days, mind you, with 90,000 points of fire in the jungle - where now Lula is trying to restore order.
A world that Salgado (Aimorés, Minas Gerais, 1944) has portrayed even at the cost of a steep fall on Pico da Neblina, the highest in Brazil - with three thousand meters of height and which is within the Amazon region –, where he suffered an accident that required two operations. And the result of so many years of work is the great Amazônia exhibition, which aspires to convey the enormous beauty of the region and the importance of preserving both the forest and the lives of the inhabitants. With more than 200 photographs, most of them large format, plus seven films and a sound setting by Jean-Michel Jarre based on Amazonian sounds from the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva. An exhibition that has already traveled to Paris, London or São Paulo, with more than 1.5 million visits, and that, after Madrid - until January 14th - will next year be seen at the Barcelona Maritime Museum.
Salgado, despite everything, is optimistic: "Bolsonaro has been very bad and very good for the Amazon. Very bad because it destroyed the protection institutions of the Amazon. On the one hand, the National Indigenous Foundation (Funai), which controls indigenous territories. Brazil is the only country on the planet that has protected its forests and its indigenous communities through the Constitution. You cannot enter indigenous territory without authorization from Funai and the indigenous people themselves. Usually, it was directed by a great anthropologist, a great sociologist, who knew the issue; he has put a police delegate there and dismantled the control points at the junctions of the rivers so that it could be entered. The other institution that has been destroyed is the Brazilian Institute of the Environment, which had satellites, planes with radars, and identified a forest fire. Bolsonaro withdrew all this and, in this way, the estates burned the areas they were razing to grow. But the space is immense, possibly during his time he destroyed 0.3%, we went from 17.2% of jungle destroyed to 17.5%. Lula has restored the institutions, but it will take time to go back. In the Yanomami area alone, there were 22,000 gold miners”. But, he concludes, "the positive part of Bolsonaro is that until he came to power no Brazilian from the south had any concern for the Amazon and indigenous communities. With him, they have seen that destruction is a possibility."
