An image captured by the artist’s custom-built multispectral video camera mounted to the nose of an aircraft and flown over Yanomami Territory in Roraima, on the Brazil-Venezuela border. The artist worked with a machine-vision spectronomy engineer to build the camera, which emulates remote sensing cameras in satellites that monitor the Earth’s environment. It is a digital multi-sensor array involving beam splitters, which captures discrete narrow bands of spectral reflectance in a very specific range, only around ten or twenty nanometers each, reflected off the earth below. GIS scientists use this technology to reveal very specific environmental information, such as ecological degradation, which is expressed as colour. The Uraricoera River in Yanomami Territory has been overrun by at least 20,000 illegal gold miners (garimpeiros) in recent years, who illegally mine deep within protected Yanomami ancestral territory, often pressing vulnerable Indigenous people to work in the mines or as prostitutes, while spreading diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea. The river itself is devastated by the extractive violence of widespread hydraulic mining and gold dredges, turning the water a milky light blue. The water itself carries mercury, a by-product of the mining process, poisoning aquatic life and all who live off it, including Indigenous communities.
Richard Mosse
Broken Spectre
Free entry
NGV International
Level 3, Contemporary Art & Design
1 Oct 22 – 12 Sep 23
Broken Spectre
Duration: 74 min
Irish artist Richard Mosse’s world-premiere moving image work, Broken Spectre, is a powerful response to the devastating and ongoing impact of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest. Filmed over three years in remote parts of the Amazon Rainforest, Broken Spectre is presented across an immersive 20-metre widescreen panorama, utilising different visually arresting strategies to depict the unfolding crisis; each shifting in scale and focus to convey these urgent environmental fault lines more powerfully.
Piercing vision by satellite cameras show the destruction’s scale and organisation, interspersed by images showing the vibrant matter of interdependent rainforest biome. Environmental frontlines are depicted through the iconography of the Western film genre, transporting the viewer to burning tracts of tropical rainforest.
Broken Spectre is an uncompromising – and often moving – examination of one of the most pressing environmental concerns and prompts viewers to reflect upon the impact and scale of this complex global issue. The film presents a phasing of ecological narratives that shifts wavelengths across environmental, anthropocentric, and nonhuman violence, to articulate different fronts of destruction at play in the Amazon.
Time itself is a crucial part of this catastrophe, as mass deforestation began in earnest in the early 1970s when the Trans-Amazonian Highway (Rodovia Transamazônica), was built to open the primeval forest for development. Only a few generations later, this development has destroyed one fifth of the Amazon rainforest to make way for the cattle, soybean, and mining industries.
Broken Spectre is co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation, and by the Serpentine Galleries. Additional support provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery.
Richard Mosse has been awarded a 2022 residency with Arts at CERN with the support of Didier and Martine Primat Foundation and its special fund Odonata, Geneva.