Broken Spectre
Richard Mosse
Aug 24–Dec 15
Award-winning artist Richard Mosse’s major new work premieres in Portland. Taking you deep in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, Broken Spectre is the result of three years filming in the world's largest rainforest. Seeking to overcome the inherent challenges of representing climate change, this is Mosse’s most ambitious project to date.
Broken Spectre is a dreamlike immersive video artwork that documents widespread yet unseen fronts of deforestation and systemic ecocide in the Amazon, unveiled using a range of powerful scientific imaging technologies, at the tipping point of this crucial ecosystem’s erasure.
Through abrupt leaps in scale and medium, the film reveals unsustainable processes of extractive violence: illegal logging, mass burning, wildcat gold mining, the theft of Indigenous lands, species extinction, flooding and damming of rivers, and the forest’s colonization for encroaching monoculture plantations and vast intensive cattle farms.
“For decades, scientists have harnessed advanced forms of remote sensing photography to understand the forest’s degradation, model tipping points, and reveal impending environmental catastrophe underway in the Amazon. In Broken Spectre, I have tried to dial in on these opaque subjects using similar scientific imaging technologies, aggravated media that carry some agency in the biome’s destruction, as they are also used as tools of resource extraction by mining and agribusiness interests. So, as in past projects, the media I have chosen to tell these stories is embedded with complex, invisible layers of the systems involved, on international, governmental, and local levels.
I’ve used these media to make a Western, because the fraught iconography of the Western film carries uncanny echoes of the reality that I encountered in the field — a natural paradise and its Indigenous population being colonized by pioneer settlers with the righteous zeal of Manifest Destiny and a distinctly Texano style of cowboy culture. Broken Spectre, which I made in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost, is a disquieting portrait of willful environmental catastrophe along the Trans-Amazonian Highway told through a kaleidoscope of scientific, cultural, historic, socio-political, activist, and anthropological filters.” — Richard Mosse
Broken Spectre was co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation, and Serpentine Galleries. Additional support was provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery.