Together they rise from the water, three dark circles suspended on ropes. A spray of leaves is snagged in one, as if it were wearing a headdress. These ominous forms are pulleys, tethered to a mineral dredge used to extract gold from the riverbed of the Amazon. The destructive practice is one of many that Richard Mosse, an Irish photographer, documents in “Broken Spectre”, an extraordinary portrait of environmental crime in the Amazon, 60% of which lies in Brazil. Created over five years with Trevor Tweeten, a cinematographer, and Ben Frost, a composer, the video artwork is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and at 180 Studios, a gallery in London.

“Broken Spectre” is urgent. On October 30th Brazilians will vote in a run-off to decide whether or not to give Jair Bolsonaro a second term in office. The fate of the rainforest hangs in the balance. Levels of deforestation have reached a record high on Mr Bolsonaro’s watch, and nearly all of it is illegal. His scorn for indigenous reserves and environmentalists has emboldened criminals, who are among the subjects of Mr Mosse’s work.

“These fronts of deforestation were being overlooked,” he says. So he wanted to make people look again, “to refresh the imagery of the burning rainforest”. In someone else’s hands, 74 minutes of cattle ranchers, logging, wildfires and garimpeiros (illegal “wildcat” goldminers) could become repetitive. But the sequence unfolds on a 20-metre-wide screen, and is deftly edited to match a soundscape so loud that it reverberates through the visitor’s body. It combines three unusual mediums: multispectral aerial footage, glowering black-and-white film, and time-lapses of the forest at night, shot in ultra-violet (pictured, above). The flora glows. The overall effect is surreal, even nightmarish, and continues the disquieting beauty that characterises Mr Mosse’s previous work.

The objective was to document the destruction in a way that “carried the ambiguity that I was seeing on the ground”, the artist says. He weaves moments of domesticity—the humdrum life of a fazendeiro (farming) family with a young boy—into events that are nauseatingly visceral: a man butchers the headless carcasses of cattle raised by vaqueros (cowboys) on deforested land. All sides of the fraught debate over the Amazon are captured.

Elsewhere a logger fells an almighty tree with a chainsaw and then stares brazenly into the camera—a show of the trust that Mr Mosse and his team built with these people, despite the risks. By plainly depicting the lawlessness of the Amazon, in place of the exotic clichés frequently associated with it, “Broken Spectre” plays with expectations. It may prompt viewers on the other side of the world to reconsider their own role in the rainforest’s demise. Some beef and soy consumed in the West has been linked to illegally cleared land, for instance.

“Broken Spectre” continues Mr Mosse’s pioneering use of photographic technologies to tell a story. To record the migrant crisis unfolding around the Mediterranean between 2014 and 2017, he chose a thermal radiation camera, more frequently wielded by soldiers than by artists. This time he has repurposed the satellite imagery used by climate scientists to artistic effect. In the film, vast areas of flooded or cleared rainforest are depicted in an unfamiliar palette of turquoise, violet and coral (pictured, below). This is multispectral imaging, a technology that can capture light from electromagnetic frequencies outside the wavelengths that are visible to the human eye.

Mr Mosse recalls that when, in 2020, fires blazed through roughly a quarter of the Pantanal, the vast tropical wetland that lies south of the Amazon, his camera could detect fires smouldering beneath the desiccated soil. “Broken Spectre” is said to be the first time a multispectral camera has been used for moving images, achieved by mounting a custom-built device to a helicopter. Yet it is a nuanced medium. Mining companies employ multispectral technology to prospect for minerals; farmers use it to monitor crops on deforested land.

The most striking scene is a powerful reminder of art’s ability to shift perceptions. Mr Mosse says his film is “deliberately and carefully non-didactic”. Yet it is a hard-hearted person who looks away from the spontaneous monologue delivered by Adneia (pictured), a member of the Yanomami tribe. She recently fled her village with her children after garimpeiros attacked them with automatic guns. Violence is just one of the threats mafias in the rainforest pose to these remote communities. Illnesses, such as malaria, sexually transmitted infections and covid-19, are another.

“You white people, see our reality”, she says to the camera, imploring the viewer to help her: “send your army”. In a speech raw with pain and anger, Adneia shows how, for indigenous people, saving the Amazon is a matter of life or death. The battle lines are drawn: “I’ll never give up the fight,” she says. The tragedy is that, without the support of Brazil’s politicians and more robust rainforest-protection agencies, it is one she seems destined to lose. ■

“Broken Spectre” is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne until April 23rd 2023 and at 180 Studios in London until December 4th.

Image credits: Stills from Broken Spectre, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid. © Richard Mosse. Installation view (bottom) by Tom Ross.