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.
Laura Colmenares Guerra

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 center 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.

Conception, direction, production: Laura Colmenares Guerra
Unreal developer: François Zajéga
Additional Unreal development: Slappy Inc.
Unreal environment and lighting: Samson Michel
Animation and compositing: Laura Colmenares Guerra
CG & VFX supervisor: Laura Colmenares Guerra
GIS analyst: Gabriel Codreanu
GIS Data: RAISG (Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information)
Sound design and music composition: Loup Mormont
Amazon sound field recordings: Jana Irmert & Laura Colmenares Guerra
Studio recordings: Antonin Simon
English VO: Emma Dingwall
French VO: Sarah Hebborn
Dutch VO: Nina Mallants
Portuguese VO: Fernanda Stefanski
Spanish VO: Laura Colmenares Guerra
Text editor: Camilla Colombo
Text corrections and translations: Anne Vereecken, Ellie McDonald, Nina Mallants, Santiago Colmenares Guerra

R€¥€R$€ is coproduced by OHME. With the support of the Vlaamse Overheid, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Pôle Image Magelis, the Département de la Charente, and WBI.

Laura Colmenares Guerra (CO/BE) is a Colombian artist based in Brussels. Her practice encompasses installation, sculpture, and digital 3D narratives, including animation, virtual reality, and ceramics 3D printing. Working from a research-based approach, she explores the relationships between contemporary Western societies and living ecosystems, questioning constructions of nature, territory, and technology as mediations of reality. Her work often transforms environmental data and topographic information into immersive, sensor-based experiences that connect audiences to distant ecological realities. Recent projects address themes of environmental fragility, interspecies transformation, and the entanglement between extractivist systems and vulnerable territories.

With R€¥€R$€, Laura Colmenares Guerra has created an aesthetically compelling immersive work that introduces viewers to the complexity of one of the world’s most fascinating yet endangered ecosystems: the Amazon region. Through virtual reality and interactive cartographies, the project exposes the entanglement of ecological fragility with political and economic forces, pointing out the devastating impact of extractivism and deforestation.
R€¥€R$€ highlights the fatal connection between colonialism and capitalism, which is a central theme of the artwork. By using symbols such as gold, raw materials, or algorithmic processes, the artist draws attention to the historical exploitation of the Amazon region. It immediately becomes clear that this exploitation continues to follow the logic of resource extraction. Virtual reality makes this critique particularly effective by making the power structures palpable.
The fact that the challenges facing the Amazon region do not stop at political borders was subtly conveyed through a curatorial decision regarding the division of the areas to be explored: rather than following the logic of national borders, the exhibition is divided into twenty-one sections, corresponding to the headwaters of the Amazon’s major tributaries—across nine countries and more than 847 million hectares.