Leticia Valverdes and collaborations in the Amazon Forest

Liz Wewiora: Welcome back Leticia! We first interviewed you about your practice back in 2020 and it’s worth noting your extensive history (over 20 years!) of working in socially engaged photography practice projects across the world. I’d like to jump straight into your current work which has brought you to the Amazon Forest, and hear more about why you were specifically interested to work with young people in this area? 

Leticia Valverdes: Yes, I’ve been working in a socially engaged way for over two decades, but alongside that, I’ve always carried out projects connected to the Amazon forest. From magazine stills features to documentary films that deal with conservation and socio-environmental issues.

This was my third interaction with the indigenous Munduruku people in the past five years. 

The first time I travelled to their territory was for a magazine story that became the cover of The Sunday Times. The second was to tell the story of their remarkable leader, Alessandra Korap, for a production with the BBC’s Planet Earth series. And now, this most recent visit to once again help amplify their voices in a different way. As I often said while in the village, the medium may differ, but my interest in listening to the ones living on the frontline of climate and cultural change is what guides me back to the Amazon again and again. And of course, what always guides me is the idea of giving people the voice and agency to be heard. A printed story in a respected magazine reaches one audience; a BBC series reaches another; but this latest invitation is a form of artivism that gives us more freedom of expression as the process of making the work is as important as the results, if not more. And the outcome reaches the public in other ways too.

 What always guides me is the idea of giving people the voice and agency to be heard. 

It is important to say that the Munduruku, like other indigenous groups in the Amazon, are fierce in their fight to protect their territory and want us from outside to engage with the urgency of issues like climate change, deforestation, contamination and biodiversity loss.

LW: Can you discuss how exactly you have been working with the community this time? What processes have you been using, and how have people responded to the invitation to work in this more creative and collaborative way? 

LV: The process, as with all my socially engaged projects, began with an invitation. To collaborate, to make art together with a variety of tools. In this case, I brought back printed portraits and landscapes I had taken in previous visits and offered them to the community as a starting point. As a way of exploring one of their most pressing issues, which is mercury contamination in their bodies, forest and rivers. Using paint and red urucum (a plant used to paint their bodies), sand, leaves, water and fire, people of all ages, children, women and elders intervened directly on the photographs. These marks became a form of protest, carrying stories of mercury contamination, but also of joy and resilience. Before arriving, I hoped to engage the young people, but in the end, everyone got involved and many generations worked together.

We also created cyanotypes using the contaminated river water and natural materials and embroidered beads on paper and cloth. The process was open and collective. Most prints passed through many hands, younger ones painting, older women embroidering. It became a weaving of generations and practices, rooted in their relationship with the forest.

The response was extraordinary. People immediately understood that this was a form of expression on paper, as they do when painting their own bodies. They were not being simply represented by me with my camera but creating some beautiful art that carried their own voice and talked of the contamination in their bodies. Symbolically we mainly used red to represent the blood, gold for the mining and silver for the mercury.

They were not being simply represented by me with my camera but creating some beautiful art that carried their own voice and talked of the contamination in their bodies.

And it is also important to say that this work is a second chapter of a body of work I started with my own children during the pandemic when I invited them to intervene in my own archive of Amazonian images resulting in a project called And Now My Children Know. The chapters “talk” to each other and the indigenous young people chose And Now The People Know as a name because they know and admire the work previously done with my own kids.

LW: From the imagery I’ve seen so far the process has created striking results and the engagement process seems to be present in the photographs. Like with all socially engaged projects though, I am sure there have been challenges. What have been the biggest challenges of working on the project so far? 

LV: There are always practical challenges, such as reaching remote places, navigating permissions and securing funding (Amazon is a very expensive place). And then there are emotional and ethical challenges too: how to do justice to such powerful collaborations, how to hold the stories with care and how to hold the expectations that this work will be seen and make some difference in the world.

Working in the Amazon also means confronting the scale of the crisis, the contamination, the loss, the destruction of biodiversity. It can feel overwhelming. Yet, witnessing the strength and humour of the Munduruku people transforms that heaviness into purpose.

This time, I was also attacked by mosquitoes at an unprecedented level and had an allergic reaction on my feet that made me unable to step on the ground for quite a few days. But I did not have the luxury of resting up on my hammock, as my days in the village were not many. 

LW: What are your long term ambitions for the project and those you have collaborated with? 

LV: Our hope is for this form of artivism that is And Now the People Know to travel far, visually and politically. In the immediate term, we are super proud that the project was part of the COP30 in Belém in an open-air group exhibition curated by João Kulcsar and Richard Richard Wera Mirim (Guarani), hosted at the beautiful Museum of the Federal University of Pará in the centre of Belem and will have a solo exhibition in a festival in Brazil next year.

Some of the participants were present in the conference and presented in a debate to speak for themselves and represent their community through their art. Beyond exhibitions, we want this work to spark conversations about mercury contamination, mining and Indigenous rights, both in Brazil and internationally.

For me, a socially engaged project can be many things, with multiple outcomes that not only end with a visual outcome (that can hold at once aesthetic and documentation value). I can continue as a dialogue and a bridge between worlds.

LW: It is fantastic that the work and the people you have worked with are able to hold such a central stage at COP30, and it is a real testament to the power of your work, which continues to develop every time I see it. With that in mind (and since we last interviewed you), I’d love to know what new or updated advice you might give to practitioners starting out in the world of socially engaged photographic practice today? 

Each project brings me different teachings. But some core fundamentals always stay.

To listen, actively listen. I always enter each collaboration with humility and curiosity, making an effort not to bring a previously completed formed agenda, but a skeleton of an idea. Of course, I visualise things beforehand, but my aim is to come in with tools for expression and an invitation. I trust that the work will find its own form if the relationships are real. And I am always in love with what we create. 

My aim is to come in with tools for expression and an invitation. 

Don’t rush. Trust takes time. And don’t fear beauty, beauty in the process and in the outcome has power. It can carry truth in ways that reach hearts as well as minds. I often propose and hope that our form of collaborative artivism reaches places that this sort of work might not have reached before. Why not be exhibited in galleries and museums and win prizes? People who come in contact with it can admire the work on so many levels.

In this latest project, some of the original pieces coming from the forest are so uniquely beautiful in their mix of embroidery, paint and mark making. I am in awe!

We have to understand that once a project is shared, it no longer belongs only to you. It belongs to everyone who gave a piece of themselves to it. That is both the challenge and the gift of socially engaged work.

And finally, I feel that not all socially engaged projects in the world have to have a social or environmental message. Some exist simply in the realm of magical process, of creative making for the sake of it. The more projects I do, the more I realise that the magic is in dreaming up some creative idea, transmitting that to others and showing that we can realise something together. From imagination to something concrete that will exist in the world in some way or form. Mankind has been doing so for millennia, and everyone should have access to this creative magic.

We live in a world saturated with ideas and information, so it is good to be reminded that not everything we create will be seen on a “bigger” scale. Loving the process in itself is my way of keeping myself and participants grounded in relation to expected public “successful” outcomes.

This trip to the Amazon was only possible due to an Environmental Bursary given by the Royal Photographic Society and The Photographic Angle. And I have also counted with help in kind from the Photography Department at UWE. 

The show is on in Belem until 17 December 2025.