Art and science

Visual artist Joseph Michael listens as famed photographer Araquém Alcântara and Antonio Donato Nobre, Earth Systems Researcher at the National Institute of Amazonian Research, discuss how art and science act as messengers for nature.

Araquém Alcântara’s comments have been translated from Portuguese to English.

Questions for discussion

• Araquém Alcântara says that, as an artist, he has a sacred commitment to fight for nature. Are there artists or musicians or authors that you know of who feel the same? Who are they and what is their message?

• Araquém Alcântara also says that his job is to chronicle beauty and destruction. What does he mean by this?

Transcript

Araquém Alcântara

Photographer

For me photography is connected to a deep commitment to life. It has to be engaged, it has to transform consciences. I always took photography as something that I needed to do for the country. Photography is my voice. 

Antonio Donato Nobre

Earth Systems Researcher, National Institute of Amazonian Research

Science itself is discovering, through the neuroscience, that a human being – therefore all the organisms – have multiple layers of cognition. It’s our – our axis of existing in nature is our own body, so if we can understand how our body operates in this integrative way and we can learn with the native people how to connect with nature in a way that will bring us back to this harmony. Because when you're … when you exist in harmony with the environment, with the other beings, with nature, then you realise that happiness lies there.

Araquém Alcântara

This tree, when I get close to it, it says to me, “I am very happy that you are here by my side. Tell others that I exist, that I have life and that I make life on Earth better.” 

Antonio Donato Nobre

And that’s your job as an artist and someone interested in creating this new dimension of interaction, you know, that bringing humanity together. 

Araquém Alcântara

The artist has to reflect that “Everything is alive.” That’s why he is a messenger. The more he walks, the more he realises that he has to keep walking. It is an eternal flowing river. We are just passing through. We have a duty, a sacred commitment to fight for it.

Antonio Donato Nobre

But this concern about the connection between emotions, sensorial cognition, intellectual cognition and the disconnect and the divorce between those cognition levels or loss of cognition if you will is – in my understanding – is where I would bring, put on the table if you have to have scientists and artists and creative people sitting together.

Araquém Alcântara

Brazil is very large and needs many lives to interpret it. And I dedicated my life to this. My matrix of creation is Brazil, its people and its forests.

I am a wandering photographer. My photography only exists because I walk around this country photographing man and nature. I usually say that my job is the chronicle of beauty and destruction.