Advancing a shared commitment to rethinking and co-creating futures from the Amazon through art, science, and innovation, Swissnex in Brazil, in collaboration with Istituto Svizzero in Rome and the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern, announces the three artists selected for the On Amazonian Forests | Arts & Science Residency.

The program brings together artistic practices that engage with ecological questions from diverse perspectives, opening space for new imaginaries that connect ancestral knowledge, scientific inquiry, and creative expression. Rather than focusing on a single narrative of the Amazon, the residency invites plural approaches that reflect the complexity of the forest and its global relevance.

Following an international open call, artists Clarissa Levy (Switzerland), Robertho Paredes Coral (Peru), and Sabrina Da Silva Medeiros (Brazil) have been selected for their distinct yet complementary practices, each contributing to expanding how ecological futures can be imagined and represented.

Expanding ecological narratives through art: meet the artists 

Clarissa Levy (1996) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker working between Switzerland and Brazil. Her practice combines moving image and literary writing to explore environmental imaginaries, oral narratives, and the relationships between ecology, economy, and lived experience. Drawing on long-term research in the Amazon forest, she engages with Indigenous and riverine communities, investigating how myths and ancestral knowledge shape social and ecological understandings. She is currently completing an MA in Documentary and Experimental Film at the Hochschule Luzern. During the residency, she will explore how mythical narratives and oral storytelling can be translated into moving-image works that expand contemporary notions of sustainability and ecological knowledge. 

Robertho Paredes Coral (1988) is an artist-researcher based in Madre de Dios, in the Peruvian Amazon. Working across photography and moving image, his practice engages with Amazonian cosmologies, Indigenous sovereignty, and ecological transformations. Rooted in long-term relationships with local communities, his work engages with memory, myths, and environmental change from within the territory. He holds an MA in Folkloristics and Applied Heritage Studies from the University of Tartu, and an MA in Photography and Documentary Narratives from Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid. During the residency, he will focus on fire as a relational force within Amazonian ecologies through hybrid visual practices. 

Sabrina Da Silva Medeiros (1998) is an artist based between Paris and São Paulo. Her practice spans between painting, installation, and performance, seeking to reconstitute her memories in response to Brazil’s colonial erasure, through a quest for re-enchantment. She interrogates encruzilhadas (Crossroads, understood in Afro-Brazilian culture as a sacred space of encounter, tension, and transformation between the visible and the invisible). She studied at ENSAPC (DNSEP), is currently completing a postgraduate programme at ENSBA Lyon, and has exhibited at Fondation Fiminco and La Compagnie in Marseille. During the residency, she will explore Amazonian forests as cosmological spaces by weaving together rites, urban syncretisms, and vernacular forms of knowledge.

A platform for exchange across disciplines and geographies

Throughout the residency, the selected artists will engage with researchers, cultural practitioners, and local partners from the Peruvian Amazon and Rome, fostering dialogues that bridge disciplines and geographies. Their projects reflect an ongoing effort to move beyond simplified or extractive representations of the Amazon, toward more nuanced, situated, and collaborative ways of understanding the forest and caring for it.

By connecting artistic research with ecological and cultural inquiry, the On Amazonian Forests | Arts & Science Residency reinforces the role of transdisciplinary exchange in shaping new perspectives on planetary thinking. It is through these encounters that alternative futures are taking form, grounded in both scientific insight and the richness of cultural expression.