An Artist Finds the Beauty in Brazil’s Most Polluted River

While Brazil is known for its luscious natural abundance through its forests and beaches, the fifth largest country in area has its own share of environmental issues. São Paulo, Brazil’s most populated metropolitan center, kills more people through its pollution than car accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS combined. Beyond pollution, the city’s other great environmental problem exists in the form of the Tietê River, an incredibly long body of water that crosses throughout the city through the rest of the state of São Paulo. The Tietê River is the most polluted river in Brazil, well-known throughout the country for its murky grey tone and the scattered, built-up trash that built up along the portion that passes through the city.

Brazilian artist Marcelo Moscheta depicts the Tietê River from a different and more optimistic perspective for his project, Arrasto. Rather than focusing on the polluted and smaller portion of the river that runs through the city of São Paulo, Moscheta travelled from one end of the river in Salesópolis to the other end where the Tietê River leads into the Paraná River.

In this five-month expedition realized last year from April to August, Moscheta collected a series of rocks and minerals throughout the entirety of the river, documenting and classifying them geologically, and creating a form of catalog of the Tietê River based on the natural forms encountered.

A little over a year later, Moscheta has created an installation based on his expedition that depicts the Rio Tietê with the respect it once received when it was dubbed “the truthful river” by cartographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville in 1748. Currently on display in São Paulo at Casa do Bandeirante, a city funded exhibition space, Arrasto feels like an aesthetically magnificent shrine to the natural splendor of the 714-mile-long river. A large black-and-white rendering of the river lies in the center of the installation, and on its right and left side lie the cataloged natural forms encountered by Moscheta during his journey. The left display rack corresponds to specimens found on the left half of the river, and the rack on the right to those encountered on the river’s right end.

Along with the installation, Moscheta has created an accompanying publication, consisting of critical texts by Moscheta and other artists, Divino Sobral and Douglas de Freitas, as well as a visual and textual diary of the expedition. Check out more images from Arrasto below:

Arrasto will be on display at São Paulo’s Casa do Bandeirante until December 19th. More of Marcelo Moscheta’s environmentally driven art projects can be found here.

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