Swimming at Dusk

The Amazon rainforest is our common frontline: constant battles are being fought to preserve the greatest source of biodiversity, oxygen production and climate regulation of the planet. The Amazon is also the battlefront between the ancestral vision of this land and that of the modern western society. If we were to learn from the native knowledge, we would open an unforeseen insight about medicine, nutrition, and the sustainable production of the rainforest. The dissolution of this last frontline would have global implications and change the way we see our world. The Peruvian Pavilion tells an unprecedented action in this sense: the “Plan Selva”, a large-scale public program in our amazon region that rebuilds hundreds of schools scattered in inaccessible places without services, with a new educational program that favors multiculturalism and rescues the native languages. A modular architecture, attentive to climatic conditions and respectful to the Amazonian way of life, restores dignity to a population that was historically relegated, offering spaces for the balanced encounter between two apparently irreconcilable worlds. The exhibition immerses us in the Peruvian Amazon through visual actions showing the immeasurable mystery of its inhabitants and the impenetrable lushness of the jungle. A fragile and undulating ribbon and a group of tables and chairs brought from the Amazonian schools, compels us, as in the Amazon rainforest, to be responsible for preserving this balance.