Wildly Accurate: The ecology of Chico da Silva’s Amazon

Our currently exhibiting artist Chico da Silva painted fantastical creatures inspired by his lived experience in the Amazon rainforest. His vibrant paintings, showing subjects ranging from jungle predators to sea monsters, capture the essence of ecological and evolutionary processes from an Indigenous viewpoint. Chico’s creatures are frequently locked in life and death struggles, reflecting the struggle for existence of all living animals today. They inhabit a ‘landscape of fear’, a world shaped entirely around the threat of being eaten, where they compete, they court and they consume. In this special walkthrough, Kate Durrant, a behavioural ecologist who has worked alongside Indigenous communities around the world, will explore how Chico’s imaginary beasts encode genuine ecological logic.