A love letter to the Amazon
Video arte rcorded in the Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve in Iquitos, using video projection and live video mapping.
Concept
elena victoria pastor
Iquitos, 2025
In A Love Letter to the Amazon (2025), elena victoria breaks with the colonial habit of speaking about a territory and, instead, dares to address it directly. Conceived during the Correlación Amazónica residency in Iquitos, the video emerges from a landscape marked by drought, illegal logging, and cattle ranching—wounds that the camera does not show directly but that pulse beneath every frame. The artist listens to another grammar: that of the Kukama-Kukamiria people, where the river is a serpent, a mother of fish, a relative. Where the drowned do not leave the world but continue breathing beneath the skin of the water. To make this work is to unlearn the vertical gaze of conquest and to wrap oneself in the horizontal language of kinship. A love letter written on the edge of collapse.
A single voice recites a poem of fragile questions—can you exist beyond reason? could we hold a conversation without words?—while the world of images responds with red curves that could be fire, water, or the slow heartbeat of a body that, though it lacks a heart, beats nonetheless. The video does not narrate; it wraps itself around the absence left by centuries of plunder. In ecofeminist poetics, to care is not to save but to accompany, to admit that reason has been both the weapon and the wound. Elena Victoria fails on purpose. She offers that failure as a form of offering. Perhaps falling short in understanding is the only honest stance when addressing a being older than your own species. And perhaps that trembling, failed gesture is, in the end, what a letter to the Amazon rainforest should look like.
The work includes, as complementary material, an audio interview conducted by elena victoria with Mariluz Canaquiri, a leader of the Kukama people, in which the community's own voice narrates its life, memory, and worldview.
Exhibited at: 2026 ICPNA Iquitos, collective exhibition Las aguas que suben y bajan (The Waters That Rise and Fall), curator Marcos Herrera. The piece was acquired for the museum's collection in Lima.
Images: courtesy from artist
A single voice recites a poem of fragile questions—can you exist beyond reason? could we hold a conversation without words?—while the world of images responds with red curves that could be fire, water, or the slow heartbeat of a body that, though it lacks a heart, beats nonetheless. The video does not narrate; it wraps itself around the absence left by centuries of plunder. In ecofeminist poetics, to care is not to save but to accompany, to admit that reason has been both the weapon and the wound. Elena Victoria fails on purpose. She offers that failure as a form of offering. Perhaps falling short in understanding is the only honest stance when addressing a being older than your own species. And perhaps that trembling, failed gesture is, in the end, what a letter to the Amazon rainforest should look like.
The work includes, as complementary material, an audio interview conducted by elena victoria with Mariluz Canaquiri, a leader of the Kukama people, in which the community's own voice narrates its life, memory, and worldview.
Exhibited at: 2026 ICPNA Iquitos, collective exhibition Las aguas que suben y bajan (The Waters That Rise and Fall), curator Marcos Herrera. The piece was acquired for the museum's collection in Lima.
Images: courtesy from artist