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R€¥€R$€- 2024

Getting closer to the Amazon is like zooming into an immensely complex and abundant system. Diving deeper is confronting, as it leads to the experience that, in fact, one knows nothing. 

R€¥€R$€ is a 30-minute Virtual Reality piece that deepens into the complex situation of Amazonia. The work is structured in four chapters: immersive real-time 3D environments, built and running on Unreal Engine, transport the viewer along rivers, through jungle-like environments; a documentary section interweaves archival footage with the virtual world; and at the centre of the experience, six interactive maps reveal the pressures of extractivism across the Amazon Basin: deforestation, oil and gas blocks, legal and illegal mining, hydroelectric plants, road infrastructure, and fire zones.

The project is the third chapter of the Ríos Trilogy (2018-2024), a body of work exploring the Amazon Basin through the relationship between language, cartography, and the construction of territory. The trilogy does not attempt to represent the Amazon. It interrogates how we, people shaped by Western traditions of thought, relate to this territory. R€¥€R$€ does not pretend to speak for Amazonia or its peoples. It examines how colonial systems of representation construct particular narratives about a territory that belongs, first and foremost, to itself.

The interactive maps are built entirely on open-source geospatial data produced by RAISG (Red Amazónica de Información Socioambiental Georreferenciada), a consortium of civil society organisations across six Amazonian countries that operates in collaboration with COICA (Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica), representing more than 500 Indigenous Peoples across the basin. This data emerges from decades of collaborative work between scientists, activists, and Indigenous peoples who inhabit and defend these lands. The maps in R€¥€R$€ are not neutral representations. They are documents of resistance, built by organisations working on the ground, in dialogue with the communities whose territories are being mapped.

A central methodological decision was to organise the cartographic exploration through hydrological divisions rather than political boundaries. The twenty-one territories explored correspond to the basins formed by the primary tributary rivers of the Amazon. For many Indigenous peoples, rivers are sacred, they are ancestors, they are the circulatory system of a living world. These are ontologies, ways of understanding territory that predate and exceed the cartographic imagination of the "modern" state. By structuring the VR experience around river basins, the work aligns itself, modestly and from the outside, with this understanding of territory as interconnected, as unified by water rather than divided by sovereignty.

The VR experience is available in the five official languages of the Amazon Basin countries (Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch), among the hundreds of languages spoken across the territory.

R€¥€R$€ underlines the tensions present in the territory, where human, cultural and environmental aspects rub with power, economics and multinational interests in a context of climate stress in which importance of preserving this unique ecosystem is vital for the survival of the current life on Earth.