The lecture I was most looking forward to happened on the morning of our fourth day. I was eager to learn more from Emanuele Coccia since I had previously been reading his book, Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture.  His presentation was elegant, profound, and playful all at the same time. I recorded almost all of it.

While Emanuele referenced The Life of Plant, I felt he was already previewing another one to come. His book is written from the point of view of a philosopher, criticizing the discipline of philosophy which has always overlooked plants and seldom knows their names. Even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. Yet Emanuele believes that plants give life to the earth. They produce the atmosphere that surrounds us. They are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct elementary connection that life can establish with the world.

 “Oh, my earth,” Emanuele implored, on the first image of his power point— “Why are we still together.  Are we?”  He went on to explain that we don’t really know the Earth at all; we are used to measuring the Earth from our position on the ground, in relation to our own feet. But never talk about the geography below the ground. My notes from his lecture are poetic and profound: “We are inhabiting the sky, but we name our partner wrongly. You are what you are based on—our touching the ground.”

I loved how he identified the toxicity within the traditional Gaia mythology, and wondered why we recognize Gaia as representative of the Earth. Emanuele implored us to realize that we are at this moment in a truly revolutionary time for the first time ever because of climate change, which forces us to confront “the whole of everything”; all parts at once.

Emanuele spoke of Davi Kopenawa’s word “omama” for Earth, the subject that produced every single culture in our world. One part of the identity of the Earth can be expressed by every word we have for it. As Emanuele sees it, our job is to find a way to express the whole world in one word. We must find and define a new name. He says that it’s not just a noun we are searching for; it’s all of us. We are the cosmos, Earth. And we are confronted with the problem of knowing more, collectively, than ever before about what’s happening all around the world. “It is a collection of everything that has existed and will exist.” I could go on—I have pages upon pages of notes and many recordings. If you’re interested in hearing more, you’ll let me know when I get home.

I look forward to continuing a friendship with Emanuele after this experience. We hope to meet in New York and Philly in the Spring.

There were many surprise visitors that day. First there was curator Claudi Carreras with his two colleagues, Photo-journalist Joseph Zarate and journalist Andreas Cardona Cruz from Columbia. They were spending three months traveling through the Amazon meeting communities along the way, interviewing people for an exhibition he was planning to present in Barcelona this November about the importance of the Amazon River for the world and Brazilian artists who are part of it.

Also visiting was an inspiring Activist and her son from Lima, Peru. The activist was in town to perform at a festival at the Opera house in Manaus. She spoke compellingly about her people and how they were persecuted and denied fresh water in their community. However, she is a warrior and feminist who has survived and leads her people through artwork and music.

Even though this was the dry season, it rained about three separate times during our stay. One of them was very fortuitous because it allowed me to capture my leaves in the rain, and also to capture video and sound in the rain, which I hope to use later.

We concluded our fourth day with a magical night walk led by Francisco Felipe Xavier, who we called Chico. He was a colorful, enthusiastic scientist who made the nighttime walk truly special.

He drew our attention to all sorts of life, from a pregnant tarantula to an iridescent scorpion. I enjoyed watching the leaf ants marching along doing their night-time work. When we got somewhat deeper on our path, he took out a large tarp and placed it on the ground.  We all took our shoes off and sat there in the darkness listening to the sounds, adjusting our eyes and imagining what it was like for those who lived in the forest hundreds of years earlier.