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YANA Amazonas
24 October 2024 @ 18:30 - 24 November 2024 @ 12:30
A photographic project by Gabriele Zago
curated by Laura Tota
The Gallery Pirra is pleased to present the photographic project by Gabriele Zago Yana Amazonas – fifteen works, portraits and landscapes, in different limited editions and sizes (the largest 100 x 143 cm) – which deals with a theme of extraordinary global importance: the complex relationship between man and nature in the Amazon region, under the growing threat of oil companies. Zago’s choice to undertake this trip between Ecuador and Peru in the summer of 2023 is not limited to an experience of anthropological documentation, but it results in a deep aesthetic and symbolic exploration of the contrast between the uncontaminated environment and the imminent destruction. As the artist explains: “Each image is a collection of dozens of different shots meticulously assembled to compose the perfect picture of the forest, an optimistic effort towards the return to a pristine and ‘beautiful’ nature.” But this is not reality. The color is obscured by a black veil that invades the environment, it turns off and poisons it. The use of black as an element pervasive in the work of Zago becomes a powerful metaphor: petroleum, physical representation of industrial progress, becomes the dark force that envelops and contaminates the natural world and its inhabitants. The threat to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon emerges as another thread of the project. The technique adopted of “uniting” several shots in a final composition reflects the fragmentation of the lived experience of the indigenous peoples, divided between their ancestral bond with the forest and external intrusion. Chromium platings, neatly geometric in an unregulated and chaotic nature, which cross Zago’s photographs and represents the pipelines that cut through the landscape and the lives of these communities, acts as an ambivalent symbol: while representing a glittering progress, they are also a sign of destruction. Even in Yana, what appears precious and glittering is, in reality, a concrete and oppressive threat. Zago does not limit himself to visual denunciation: his personal involvement with local communities, with their rituals and their stories, makes him an authentic interpreter of the dynamics of cultural resistance. The issue of the overlap between ethnic minorities and natural wealth is a theme that runs through much of the history of photojournalism, but Zago’s approach is not merely documentary. Each photograph is a symbolic elaboration in which the industrial threat and natural beauty coexist, generating a tension, visual and conceptual, that forces us to reflect not only on ecological devastation, but also on the resilience of indigenous cultures. Photography, in this context, becomes a form of resistance, a means to denounce and, at the same time, to honor the spiritual depth of those who continue to defend their land.
Yana is an ancient word of Quechua origin, the language spoken by the Incas in their vast empire and extinct with Spanish colonization. Having survived through the centuries, the name Yana is still popular, it has a nuanced meaning, but in general, it is associated with harmony and prosperity.
