The new exhibition ‘Amazônia. Indigenous Worlds’ in Bonn overturns long‑standing European clichés that cast the Amazon as a pristine, timeless wilderness and Indigenous peoples as relics of a distant past. Co‑curated by anthropologist Leandro Varison and Brazilian Indigenous artist‑activist Denilson Baniwa, the show presents the region as a living cultural landscape shaped by dense networks of exchange, social complexity and relationships that include human and other‑than‑human beings.
Instead of a conventional museum chronology, the curators arrange works to reflect Indigenous senses of history and time, portraying culture as continuous, adaptive and present. The exhibition treats ‘Amazônia’ as a broad cultural and historical area roughly corresponding to the Amazon Basin — spanning Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana — and highlights its extraordinary linguistic diversity. Scholars estimate that more than 1,000 languages existed across the region before European contact; today over 300 Indigenous languages remain, alongside signed, whistled and drummed forms of communication. Varison contrasts this with the European Union’s 24 official languages to underscore the area’s enduring cultural vitality.
Themes on display include creation stories, community relations and Indigenous visions for the future, with an emphasis on continuity rather than isolation. Several works directly confront how Europeans historically represented and erased Indigenous peoples. Jaider Esbell’s Carta ao Velho Mundo (Letter to the Old World, 2018–2019) is a striking example: Esbell painted, wrote and drew over reproductions in a 1972 encyclopedia that presented Western painting as ‘universal,’ inserting Indigenous cosmologies and urgent environmental messages to decolonize the book’s claim to universality.
Denilson Baniwa’s Caçadores de Ficções Coloniais (Hunters of Colonial Fiction, 2021) reworks early anthropological photographs that once classified or exoticized Indigenous peoples. By adding global pop‑culture icons — a DeLorean from Back to the Future, King Kong, Godzilla — Baniwa exposes the constructed nature of those stereotypes and the role collections played in shaping them.
The show also highlights archaeological and ecological research that disputes the myth of an untouched wilderness. Before colonization, millions of people managed forest gardens and created terra preta, the fertile, carbon‑rich soil produced over centuries by adding charcoal and organic matter. Many now‑familiar species — including Brazil nut, cacao and açaí — were shaped by Indigenous cultivation long before European arrival, emphasizing long histories of human stewardship.
Varison rejects the notion that Indigenous peoples ‘belong to the past.’ He notes that mobile phones and social media are tools of adaptation rather than signs of cultural loss: ‘If we Western people have the right to change, why shouldn’t they?’ The exhibition also presents a different sense of temporal belonging: many communities see history as active in the present, carried through relationships with ancestors, places and non‑human beings, while categorizing ‘white people’ as relatively recent ‘Others’ defined by different ways of seeing.
Curators stress that some groups choose contemporary isolation as a living choice, not a marker of being archaic. By centering Indigenous knowledge, practices and worldviews as evolving and present, ‘Amazônia. Indigenous Worlds’ reframes the region away from timelessness toward lived historical complexity.
The exhibition runs through August 9, 2026.
Edited by Elizabeth Grenier.