For many years, Elsa Leydier lived by the Atlantic Forest in Brazil — a forest that stretches along the Brazilian coastline for thousands of kilometres, becoming inseparable from the Atlantic Ocean into which it flows.

 

It is a forest which is fast disappearing to absolute indifference, especially compared to the emotion triggered by the Amazon Forest. Only 8% of the surface which covered Brazil when the Portuguese invaded, remains. 

Its destruction has been driven by capitalism. The Porto Sul project affected the artist particularly — perhaps because it was located close to her home. The construction of this industrial port has been destroying acres of forest and seabed (on the migration path of whales) before our very eyes, threatening thousands of local livelihoods: those of fishermen, members of the Landless Workers' Movement, Quilombola communities, and other inhabitants of the region.

'Luto' in Portuguese means mourning. Mourning the loss of the forest, its teeming life and wild, creative biodiversity dying a slow death under the muted sound of rampant capitalism.
 

In this work, pages from decrees and deforestation authorizations that paved the way for the construction of Porto Sul are affixed to photographs of Mata Atlântica and the Ocean. These utterly ordinary A4 sheets appear as anomalies, colonising a luxuriant environment they do not belong to — and that they therefore hide, destroy, erase.

Like an echo of the widespread feminist street collages which have sprung up in recent years, black painted letters have changed 'luto' into 'luta'. If a simple sheet of A4 can trigger the destruction of a forest and entire ecosystems, it can also be the pillar for other fights, for social justice and climate change which will save lives and forests. 'Luta' means fight. A reminder that resistance can rise from any wound. Now more than ever, we must seize the tools at our disposal — often "the master's tools" — and subvert them, fight back in our own way. By altering the meaning of the word it covers, the A becomes proof that strength can be summoned from the very heart of a wound, that luto has the potential to become 'luta'.

 

The images are printed on environmentally friendly paper made from European hemp. The frames are made in China. Through these production choices, Elsa Leydier sought to underscore the idea that even when we act with the best intentions, we remain dependent on a system that extracts its raw materials from Latin America and exploits cheap labour in Asia.

 

Like ecofeminism itself, LUTO/A calls for our current capitalist system to be questioned and dismantled in its entirety — rather than addressed through small, isolated actions that merely patch it up, as a few strips of tape might hold together a collapsing structure.