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.
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.