RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The immensity of the Amazon, its riches, the ethnic groups that live there, and their customs are part of an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) that from this Friday immerses the viewer in the reality of the most extensive tropical rainforest on the planet to highlight the urgency of its conservation.
The exhibition “Futures”, which can be seen next June at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio, brings an updated perspective of this biome and proposes new challenges to keep the rainforest standing.
With time as the driving force, the exhibition immerses the viewer in the jungle from the beginning, with sounds typical of the Amazonian fauna and various images and native elements that set the scene and whose characteristics can be consulted interactively by the public.
The exhibition covers topics such as fauna, flora, people, and culture, offering information on the daily life of the local populations, the traditions perpetuated and the multiple languages used, the result of a research work that took more than four years, of which several months directly in the jungle.
In total, there are seven areas to visit that also open space for play, with games for adults and children, some of the virtual reality.
Present in eight countries and one territory (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Venezuela, and French Guyana), the Amazon is currently home to more than 30 million people of 400 indigenous ethnic groups and thousands of plant species and is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.
In addition to the riches that the Amazon rainforest preserves, the exhibition also highlights the transformations that this biome has undergone due to the devastation of its native vegetation, caused mainly by illegal mining, illegal timber trade, or the unbridled expansion of agribusiness.
In the Brazilian Amazon alone, which covers the largest area of this biome, more than 8,000 square kilometers of forest have been destroyed this year.
For Leonardo Menezes, director of knowledge and creation of the Museum of Tomorrow and curator of the exhibition, the Amazon is experiencing a “critical moment” due to the high rates of deforestation, so the show seeks to open our eyes to this reality to transform it.
In this sense, he told EFE, it is necessary to “promote a new model of socio-economic development based on scientific knowledge, on the practices and knowledge of traditional peoples and on the commitment to preserve the standing forest”.
Ecotourism, the sustainable exploitation of fruits and medicinal plants typical of the Amazon, or genetic research of the biome’s species are activities that can be promoted in the jungle, with its communities, and with the support of science for the new development model.
The exhibition will be in Rio until June 12, will have a virtual show available to the public starting in January.