Altamira

In April 2013, the Brazilian artist Caio Reisewitz had the opportunity to study the city of Altamira: the disorderly growth, the devastation of the forest, and the neglect of the indigenous community in the wake of the construction of the Belo_Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant.
He returned to Altamira in April 2018 to photograph the environmental impact after the construction of the dams. His new photographic book tells about this story.

When the Belo Monte hydro power plant, which is being constructed in the Amazon basin, begins to operate at full capacity, the landscapes will be mostly submerged. The polemic construction project of a dam on the Xingu River, in the state of Pará, Brazil, has dramatically altered the natural landscape impacting the flora and fauna of the region, and also causing major social conflicts, involving above all indigenous and riverside communities, displaced by the mounting pressure stemming from the sharp population growth.

It was precisely the perspective of making an on-site visit to observe this conflict-ridden territory – be it the Amazon biome now marked by a vast engineering work, or the local population with the migrants attracted by the sudden offer of jobs and circulation of money - which impelled the artist Caio Reisewitz to visit such a difficult-to-access region for the first time in 2013 and again in 2018.

One of Brazil's leading contemporary photographers, Caio Reisewitz has frequently exhibited in South America and in Europe, and represented Brazil at the 2005 Venice Biennale. 

Texts by: Joerg Bader, Caterina De Pietri, Valéria Piccoli, Eduardo Viveiros de Castr