Amazonian vessels here and there: art and political ecology in the work "Resgate" (1992) by Roberto Evangelista.

In 1992, at the quincentenary of Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean, Amazonian vessels landed on Antwerp, a former Spanish port, during the exhibition "America: Bride of the Sun." Blocking the passage flow, visitors encountered hundreds of gourds at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts entryway. Made of a fruit commonly found in the Amazon, those vessels contaminated the building's Neoclassical asepsis. They belonged to Brazilian Roberto Evangelista's installation "Resgate." In June of the same year, Evangelista executed a second version of "Resgate" for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. This variation was a happening and involved the participation of local people from Manaus (capital city of the state of Amazonas, Brazil). This public performance included collective chants and gestures and the release of gourds into the Negro River, referencing indigenous practices. In this paper, I will analyze these two versions of "Regaste" as two moments of the same work. I am interested in understanding Evangelista's strategies in relation to the specific contexts of production and display and how the two versions of the work conserve conceptual coherence while varying the media and techniques. I argue that Evangelista's formal variation intended to mobilize interrelated political-ecological questions linked to the sites. They ultimately correlate ecological crisis and Amazonia's long history of colonization and exploitation.