隐蜇在重叠的山脉中-莱娅·勒布里孔特展

Like a spotlight aimed at a distorting mirror, Léa Le Bricomte transforms an experience of alliance into an unsettling poetic fable. The artist’s alliance with the Paiter-Surui, an Indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon first contacted in the 1970s, is both political and familial. The story told by the exhibition is that of those who hide in the folds of the hills—not the Surui, contrary to what the exhibition’s title might suggest, but the garimpeiros, clandestine gold miners who have ravaged Indigenous territories for decades. They are distant heirs of Spanish, Portuguese, and more broadly European explorers who, five centuries ago, made the Conquest the matrix for the modern—and alas now global—relationship to the living world: colonial and extractivist.

Far from delivering a lesson in (bio)politics, Le Bricomte draws us into a waking dream. A hybrid forest welcomes us, composed of artificial plants with insistent gazes and sounds recorded directly in the Amazon. Gold mining is reduced to its fundamentally derisory nature. Shaken by random jolts, a shaking table no longer sorts earth to extract gold; instead, it makes kilos of glitter dance. The machete no longer cuts a path through the density of the forest; it becomes a childlike lamp through which a starry sky takes shape.

Le Bricomte’s art makes no explicit statement—her activist action is carried out through the association Aquaverde, which she chairs. In the exhibition, the artist jams the anarcho-colonial machine of gold mining, which thrives according to political alternations. The Paiter-Surui hammock supports the saw blade of those who hide in the folds of the hills. It is a fragile balance, for the sharp edge of the blade could at any moment tear the traditional hammock. Yet in this cosmo-techno-futurist fabulation, the metal blade has become wood. Smoothed by contact with the woven thread, it has lost its edge. Only the machete remains metal—an object common both to those who live with the forest and to those who destroy it.

The Paiter-Surui people are now known for the exemplary struggle led by Chief Almir Naraymoga Surui for reforestation and the development of carefully managed agroforestry, which has become the community’s main source of income—sustainable and respectful of their biotope. At the same time, evangelization has led shamans to renounce their gifts and to guard the doors of churches. In Dongguang, the evocation of the struggles that bleed the Amazon—garimpeiros deforesting it in search of gold—is mediated through another mining history. The red earth brought back from the former Wumuchong mine acts as a reminder of art’s transformative and regenerative power: the magical hill that provides imaginaries (the International Art Zone of Meitanba) rather than the hill ripped open for a few nuggets of precious metal.

A machinic cosmogony, Le Bricomte’s installation mirrors Rondônia: a fragment of the Amazon that has been massively deforested, a Brazilian far west far removed from romantic imaginaries of the primary forest, a territory that must constantly be demarcated, reforested, and protected from incursions by gold miners and the voracious appetites of intensive agriculture. Against a backdrop of colonial predation, this territory is traversed by asymmetric and opposing forces. Here, the power of art may seem terribly derisory.

Through a dynamic of constant back-and-forth—artistic and political—Le Bricomte’s work opens spaces, dreamlike worlds of violence and light. The surplus of the textile industry becomes the haystack in which one searches for the gold tooth of the gold miner. Hidden in the folds of fabric, it too is quite derisory—but will we be able to resist the urge to seize it?