Last Tuesday, the Philharmonic Museum of Paris inaugurated an immersive and musical exhibition by Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.  The artist's intention with this exhibition is to raise awareness about the urgency of protecting the world's lungs. The project includes some 200 black and white images taken during 48 trips to the heart of this immense jungle. Salgado, 77, brought his exhibition to the Philharmonic Museum, along with his wife, curator, editor and environmentalist Lélia Wanick-Salgado. 

The show was intended to be an immersive experience thanks to the installation of perspectives conceived and worked on by Wanick-Salgado and in collaboration with the music of French composer Jean-Michel Jarre. "Lélia wanted people to feel lost in the jungle and to hear the testimonies of the indigenous people. We want people who come here to have another awareness of the Amazon when they leave," said Salgado.

For his part, Jarre used the archive of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva to work with organic, natural and at the same time electronic sounds, with which he has created a sense of "harmony of sounds" that have nothing to do with each other. "We didn't want to fall into ambient music or technical discourse. The jungle is very noisy and all its sounds are independent, it's the opposite of an orchestra," Jarre explained about the concept of the music for the exhibition.

Salgado's life has been in permanent contact with the Rainforest and the communities that inhabit it,  with this exhibition he shares that experience with the rest of the world with the intention of generating awareness of our relationship with the lungs of the world. "One arrives there from one of the most privileged cities in the world thinking that those people know nothing and it turns out that they know everything, that you are the one who has no idea about anything. We've been in America for 500 years, they've been there for 20,000," said the photographer.

Salgado did not hesitate to mention that the government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is also responsible for the deforestation of the rainforest, despite the fact that it began 40 years ago with the massive export of timber, meat, soybeans and other products to Europe.

"We lack planetary honesty, to have a real desire to protect this space and not to trade with products from deforested areas," he said. 

The exhibition will open to the general public from Thursday, with a month and a half delay due to the closure of museums in France because of the pandemic. The exhibition will remain until October 31 at the Philharmonie museum in Paris, and will then move on to São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rome and London, between the end of 2021 and 2022.