The sculpture encompasses the geographic heart of the Amazon, where the Rio Negro and the Amazon meet, the city of Manaus is located at this meeting point. The sculpture contains fragmented sections of paintings and drawings by the famed Botanical artist Margaret Mee, who spent many decades in the first half of the 20th century exploring and recording the exotic and unknown flora and fauna of the Amazon basin.
In the earliest part of the 20th Century the Amazon witnessed the Rubber boom. The capital Manaus experienced a period of extravagance and excess almost unparalleled in history, of which the opera house is perhaps the most famous example. Portraits of the principal players are visible in the sculpture, the ruthless entrepreneurs like the Peruvian Julio Arana, Colonel Nicolas Suarez and J G Araujo also Henry James Wickham, the man who brought an end to the monopoly by smuggling the rubber seeds out to Kew gardens in London. Manaus and the Amazon in the early 20th century were places where human dreams and follies coincided with great persecution and exploitation. Werner Herzog made the film Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon, an iconic film that was as much a mirror of the period as it was , by it’s very undertaking, a part of it. Indeed there was also a documentary about the film by Les Blank appropriately titled “Burden of Dreams” The sculpture contains partial images of the ship Aida, used in the film, the re purposed Aida was itself one of the many steamers that used to ply the Amazon basin in those days.
