At the core of Richard Mosse’s solo show at Art Vault is a never-before-seen presentation of the Thoma Foundation’s recent acquisition from Mosse, Broken Spectre: a captivating, 66-minute film documenting the intensive deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon.
The work highlights, on intersecting scales from the microscopic to the monumental, the agents and victims of the unfolding ecological catastrophe in the Amazon basin. In just the last fifty years, mass deforestation has wiped out about 20 percent of the original Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical rainforest in the world. In 1975, only one percent of the original forest had been lost to human resource extraction. Today, ongoing deforestation is leading to species extinction, unpredictable and extreme weather patterns worldwide, and global warming.
Broken Spectre resists categorization—Mosse employs a visual language that enlists and reinvents the strategies of photojournalism, scientific documentation, resource mapping, and cinema verité. To uncover the systemic environmental attack on the Amazon, Mosse films aerial scenes with a specially designed multispectral video camera, mirroring the technology of remote sensing satellites used by environmental scientists and mineralogists. Narratives on a human scale are exposed in ethereal glowing monochrome of 35mm anamorphic black-and-white infrared film. The non-human is unveiled using ultraviolet microscopy, showing the vast biodiversity found in just a few square inches on the forest floor. Created in collaboration with virtuoso art cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and set to a powerful score by renowned experimental composer Ben Frost, the film is both incredibly stunning and profoundly unsettling.
A comprehensive selection of large-scale photographs by Mosse complement Broken Spectre, along with a special presentation of Grid (Palimi-ú), a work from 2023 comprising two interacting elements: footage shot on 35mm infrared film that documents protest speeches by Yanomami leaders who had fled for safety to aldeia Palimi-ú, a village in Northern Brazil, and multispectral photogrammetry captured by drone over extractivist fault lines and sites of environmental crimes. This film offers a heart-breaking glimpse into ground-level community-led resistance and solidarity, rallying against the industrial gaze of multinational and corporate profit. Ben Frost’s intense score is comprised of ultrasonic recordings of rainforest beetles, bats, and other lifeforms.
In this current historical moment, it is essential, and especially poignant, to see nature through the lens of artistic expression. Broken Spectre(s) invites us to embrace this experience and welcome its inspiration as we are reminded of our relationship to the natural world, not only as spectators but also as stewards.