Broken Spectre (2022) is a dreamlike immersive video artwork that forms an extensive record of widespread yet unseen fronts of deforestation and industrialized ecocide in the Amazon, unveiled using a range of powerful scientific imaging technologies, at the tipping point of this crucial ecosystem’s erasure.

Through abrupt leaps in scale and medium, the film reveals unsustainable processes of extractive violence: illegal logging, mass burning, wildcat goldmining, the theft of Indigenous lands, species extinction, flooding and damming of rivers, and the forest’s colonization for encroaching monoculture plantations and vast intensive cattle farms.

“For decades, scientists have harnessed advanced forms of remote sensing photography to understand the forest’s degradation, model tipping points, and reveal impending environmental catastrophe underway in the Amazon. In Broken Spectre, I have tried to dial in on these opaque subjects using similar scientific imaging technologies, aggravated media that carry some agency in the biome’s destruction, as they are also used as tools of resource extraction by mining and agribusiness interests. So, as in past projects, the media I have chosen to tell these stories is embedded with complex, invisible layers of the systems involved, on international, governmental, and local levels. And I’ve used these media to make a Western, because the fraught iconography of the Western film carries uncanny echoes of the reality that I encountered in the field — a natural paradise and its Indigenous population being colonized by pioneer settlers with the righteous zeal of Manifest Destiny and a distinctly Texano style of cowboy culture. Broken Spectre, which I made in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost, is a disquieting portrait of willful environmental catastrophe along the Trans-Amazonian Highway told through a kaleidoscope of scientific, cultural, historic, socio-political, activist, and anthropological filters.” —Richard Mosse

Co-presented by Minnesota Street Project Foundation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Altman Siegel.

74 minutes and 11 seconds, four-channel 4K video with 12.2 surround sound. 15,360 x 2,160 overall video projection resolution. Produced in Brazil and Ecuador.

Broken Spectre was co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation, and the Serpentine Galleries. Additional support was provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery.

Director / Producer.....................................Richard Mosse
Cinematographer / Editor...........................Trevor Tweeten
Composer / Sound Design..........................Ben Frost
Digital Colorist / Post-Production................Jerome Thelia
Film Processing and Studio Manager...........Matthew Warren
Film Processing Advisor...............................Cary Kung
Film Processing Assistant............................Kimin Kim
Film Scanning.............................................Metropolis Film Lab
Fixer / Translator / Driver............................Gabriel Uchida
Fixer / Translator / Driver............................Alessandro Falco
Fixer / Translator / Driver............................Marco Lima
Fixer / Translator........................................Gabriel Bogossian
Fixer / Translator........................................Alejandro del Solar Bravo
Production Assistant.................................Diana Morales Ocegueda
Driver........................................................Edimar Tozzo
Helicopter.................................................Aereo Especial
Multispectral camera engineer.................Jeffrey Carson, Spectral Devices
35mm Camera Rental...............................Hand Held Films
Sound Engineer........................................Mike Amacio, Carlos Boix
Advisor.....................................................Jon Lee Anderson
Cloud Forest Guides................................Alex Guevara, Arlette Arn
Yanomama Translator..............................Ana Maria Antunes Machado

READ THE PRESS RELEASE

The Minnesota Street Project Foundation would be unable to present world-class exhibitions like Broken Spectre without the support of art lovers like you. Consider making a donation to support future projects.

Image: Richard Mosse, Broken Spectre, 2018–2022. Installation view, Minnesota Street Project Foundation, May 11–July 8, 2023. Photo by Drew Altizer Photograhy.