THE REVERSE OF HEAVEN

2023

Video installation (three-channel and single-channel with audio)

Variable dimensions / Loop 30 min

Entirely filmed in the Javarí Reserve, in the far west of the Amazon rainforest, on the triple border between Brazil, Peru and Colombia, O Avesso do Céu focuses on the conversion massively practiced by neo-pentecostals churches among the last recently-contacted indigenous peoples on the continent, present in this region, and its serious consequences for the environment.

The process is ancient and has been repeated for centuries: churches receive funds from private and predatory interests to launch evangelization missions among the indigenous people and thus begin the commercial exploitation of the territory, through the illegal extraction of wood, minerals, fauna, fisheries and flora from regions officially demarcated as preserved indigenous reserves. These missions destabilize the natural balance of entire regions and alter or exterminate the modus vivendi of the original inhabitants of these lands.

The camera navigates up the remote Javari River. It starts at a traditional initiation ritual among a Ticuna family in the Alto Solimões, documents a considerably large but illegal wood extraction site on its banks and arrives at the surprisingly recently established christian community of Nova Jerusalem.

The cataclysm we see with the arrival of the missionaries is only the beginning of a total loss of identity and the transformation of indigenous culture into an insane and miserable christian context that, in fact, borders on madness.