Art Verona : Amazonian peoples do not die, they become seeds.

ORMA is proud to participate in the 20th edition of Art Verona (10–12 October 2025, Verona Fiere) with a curatorial project that brings together four Brazilian artists from different generations and geographies: Daniel Lannes, Luciano Maia, Mercedes Lachmann, and Rafael Prado.

Presented under the title I popoli amazzonici non muoiono, diventano semi (Amazonian peoples do not die, they become seeds), the project unfolds as a powerful meditation on ancestry, ecology, and collective memory — positioning nature not as landscape, but as subject, archive, and political force.

At a time when environmental collapse and cultural erasure define urgent global debates, ORMA proposes a perspective rooted in Brazil’s complex and often contradictory realities. The booth becomes a living territory where mythologies, organic matter, visionary painting, and contemporary identity narratives intersect. Together, the works articulate a shared yet plural reflection on the symbolic and political potency of the environment, and on the inseparable bond between human beings, land, and spirituality.

For Luciano Maia, born in Pará, the Amazon is not a distant geography but a living cosmology. His paintings reactivate ancestral myths and oral traditions, weaving archetypal figures and vegetal forms into dense, pulsating compositions. Memory becomes material — layered, embodied, and insurgent — reclaiming narratives historically marginalized within dominant cultural frameworks.

Rafael Prado, also emerging from the Amazonian context, approaches the forest as a site of identity and resistance. His series “Amazonian peoples do not die, they become seed” pays tribute to activists, Indigenous leaders, and ribeirinho communities who have defended the land with their own lives. Through portraiture that oscillates between intimacy and monumentality, Prado restores visibility and dignity to those who stand at the frontlines of ecological struggle. The seed becomes both metaphor and strategy: continuity through transformation.

With Mercedes Lachmann, material itself becomes a field of sensory and spiritual activation. Incorporating healing herbs and organic substances into her works, Lachmann transforms natural matter into ritual experience. Her practice dissolves the boundary between artwork and body, invoking time as cyclical presence rather than linear progression. The viewer is invited to perceive through touch, scent, and memory — engaging with the artwork as a living organism.

Daniel Lannes, in turn, interrogates the construction of power and collective memory through painting. His compositions interlace historical references and symbolic imaginaries, exposing the fractures and silences embedded in Brazil’s past and present. Figures, gestures, and allegorical elements coexist in unstable balance, questioning official narratives and proposing alternative readings of history. In his work, memory is neither fixed nor neutral; it is a contested terrain.

Together, these four artistic voices generate a fragmented yet vital landscape — one in which nature is not backdrop but protagonist; not passive resource but active agent. The project resists exoticization and instead affirms a complex, layered Brazil: a country where the environment embodies origin and transformation, poetry and resistance.

ORMA’s presentation at Art Verona thus becomes more than a showcase; it is an affirmation of cultural continuity and political urgency. I popoli amazzonici non muoiono, diventano semi is both statement and invocation — a reminder that what appears to disappear may instead germinate, that memory persists in the soil, and that art remains a fertile ground for reimagining collective futures.