Brazilian artist and activist Mundano recently used some unusual substances to paint a picture on a building in Sao Paulo. The paint included materials, such as ash and mud, collected from natural disasters.
Mundano created the mural to highlight the issue of climate change. Extreme weather events have been causing destruction across Brazil.
The mural is very large – over 30 meters high and 48 meters wide. The artist used ash from wildfires and mud from floods. His painting shows the gray remains of trees on a brown land so dry it is cracked. The picture represents the deforestation and severe drought in the Amazon rainforest.
The mural also shows Indigenous activist Alessandra Korap wearing a circle of flowers around her head. She holds a sign that says: “Stop the destruction #keepyourpromise.” The artist says those messages are directed to Cargill, a massive soybean producer based in the United States.
Soy farming is one of the biggest causes of deforestation in the Amazon.
Cargill says on its website that it will eliminate deforestation from its supply chain in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay by 2025.
Mundano is seeking to hold the company accountable.
“We are tired of being a country, a continent where we and the natural resources we have here are exploited. ... We have to regenerate our planet instead of destroying it,” the artist said in an interview.
Cargill did not immediately answer a request for comment.
Over the past few months, human-caused wildfires have severely damaged protected places in the Amazon area. The fires burned in parts of both the large Cerrado savanna and the world’s largest tropical wetland, the Pantanal.
Smoke spread over a very large area and affected the air quality in some Brazilian cities.
Drought has caused a critical situation nationwide. Weather predictions show that this will continue in much of the country through at least the rest of October. This information comes from Cemaden, Brazil’s disaster warning center.
Droughts & floods
On October 22, the depth of the Amazon’s Negro River measured 12.46 meters, representing a small increase from 10 days earlier. At that time, the river was at its lowest point since measurements started 122 years ago.
And this last reported measure is still about 6 meters below normal for the same date in earlier years.
Rivers in Brazil’s Amazon always rise and fall with its rainy and dry seasons. But the dry season this year has been much worse than usual.
Earlier this year, a severe flood in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul killed more than 180 people, affected over 2 million people, and destroyed city communities.
Mundano, who calls himself an “artivist” (a combination of "artist and activist), used mud from that flood to create the new mural. The activist group Movement of People Affected by Dams collected the materials.
Mundano also used ashes from Brazil’s fires in the Atlantic Forest, the Pantanal, and the Cerrado. He also used earth found in waste containers in Sao Paulo and clay collected from the Sawre Muybu Indigenous land in the Amazon, where Alessandra Korap is from.
“From floods to droughts, everything is connected!” Mundano said recently in an Instagram post. He included a video showing the mural in Sao Paulo. The artist said it is his biggest mural ever.
Three years ago, he used ash from the Amazon to create a similar mural in Sao Paulo. That work showed a firefighter standing in deforested areas. It also showed a cow farm and trucks loaded with cut trees.
I’m Anna Matteo.
