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Getting closer to the Amazon is like zooming into an immensely complex and abundant system. Diving deeper is confronting, as it leads to the experience that, in fact, one knows nothing.

R€¥€R$€ delves into the socio-environmental situation of Amazonia. The work is structured in four chapters: immersive real-time 3D environments, built on Unreal Engine, transport the viewer along rivers, through jungle-like landscapes. As the viewer floats above the water, the names of the Indigenous Peoples appear inscribed in the river surface. Naming them was essential: they are the protectors of this territory.

The second chapter interweaves archival footage with the virtual world. The third, at the centre of the experience, presents six interactive maps revealing the pressures of extractivism: deforestation, oil and gas blocks, mining, hydroelectric plants, road infrastructure, and fire zones. Viewers navigate these layers, witnessing how extractive pressures accumulate and overlap across nine countries and more than 847 million hectares. The interactive maps are built on open-source geospatial data produced by RAISG, a consortium of civil society organisations across six Amazonian countries, in collaboration with COICA, representing more than 500 Indigenous Peoples across the basin.

The cartographic work explores the territory through hydrological divisions rather than political boundaries. Rivers are sacred, ancestors, the circulatory system of a living world. By structuring the experience around river basins, the work aligns itself with an understanding of territory as unified by water.

R€¥€R$€ is the third chapter of the Ríos Trilogy (2018–2024), exploring the Amazon Basin through language, cartography, and the construction of territory. The Ríos Trilogy does not pretend to speak for Amazonia or its peoples. It examines how colonial systems of representation construct particular narratives about a territory that belongs, first and foremost, to itself, and how human, cultural and environmental dimensions continue to collide with economic and political forces under acute climate stress.