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Diorama

Illustration with jaguar, rainforest animals and plants, human figures that represent different actors involved in the jaguar process: planners, researchers, poachers, traffickers, indigenous communities, peasants, tourists. Collage background with mountain landscape, map-like grid, a highway with a truck carrying logs.

Natural history museums traditionally use habitat dioramas to stage wildlife in idealized pristine natures. These displays hide the violence and colonial imperialism involved in producing taxidermy collections while also occluding the profound changes that industrial capitalism has brought to these environments. 

In contrast, this diorama deliberately reconnects the jaguar with the urban experience. Here, you will find:

  • some of the instruments and technologies used to learn about and track the jaguar;
  • the various infrastructures that exponentially reduce (and segment) the jaguar habitat;
  • the profound connection of many Indigenous communities with this feline and their role in knowledge production and stewardship of these territories;
  • the illegal trade of the jaguar, and the agro-industrial and extractive processes linked to global commodity supply chains.
  • the various communities that struggle and mobilize for their right to live without being dispossessed or polluted by the demands of urban life.
Illustration with the face of a jaguar surrounded by leaves of different rainforest plants.

Jaguars are elusive solitary animals.

Illustration with the face of a jaguar surrounded by different rainforest plants and animals like tapir, crocodile, guacamaya and a trap camera.

Tools and instruments mediate our knowledge of the jaguar and make them visible to researchers.

Illustration with the face of a jaguar, with rainforest plants and animals, a trap camera and several researchers and planners with cameras, maps and measuring instruments.

Indigenous communities also have a key role in knowledge production and stewardship of these territories by doing research and processes of monitoring and observation. 
— Camera traps, radio-collars, and attentive observations of the environment, freshwater, animals, and vegetation cover.

Illustration over a grid with palm and cattle icons and a highway with a truck carrying logs.

Many towns and cities overlap with the Jaguar Corridor. Most have yet to acknowledge this in their public policy and municipal plans, and articulate regional visions of the territory.

The processes described occur directly across the corridor’s landscapes and are intertwined with monocultures, mining and fossil fuel developments, agroindustrial enterprises, and urbanizations.

Illustration with a highway with a truck carrying logs on the left and the silhouettes of a family and an indigenous mobilization, poacher, tourist and trafficker on the right.

Key drivers in the retraction of the jaguar territory are the reason that it is also a deeply contested territory, where many communities live and struggle for environmental justice and their right to live in these territories. This is by no means an exaggeration; Latin America is the world’s riskiest place to be an environmental activist.

Wiphala*, “The presence and power of the grid in Indigenous resistance can be found in the Wiphala, a gridded pattern of multiple colors used by Indigenous peoples of the Andes to represent themselves that date as early as 1,000 BP. More recently, a seven-color variant of the Wiphala has come to symbolize the Indigenous groups that traverse the Andes from Chile to Colombia”.  (Leon and Herscher, 42, 2021)

Illustration with a highway with a truck carrying logs on the left. A collage image with a satellite image of land and water and cargo ships on the bottom. Mountain landscape and different altitude range on the top.

The decline of the jaguar is intertwined with processes that occur directly across the corridor’s landscapes and with wider and more distant territories across the world. These landscapes are linked to global supply chains that extract and transform natures into commodities.

Illustration with mountain landscape and different altitude range on the top and a collage of images on the bottom with cave paintings and native indigenous figures.

The recognition of the key role that jaguars play in the America’s ecosystems is consistent with the cosmologies and knowledges of various Indigenous communities across the continent that for thousands of years have embedded the jaguar within their web of relations, regarding it as a symbol of power, strength, and fertility. (Rabinowitz, 2014, p. 37).

— Amazonian Indigenous rock art from circa 700AP at “The Maloca of the Jaguar” (Arte rupestre) in Chiribiquete National Park, Colombia. Year: 2016. Photograph taken by: Jorge Mario Álvarez Arango. Source: UNESCO
— Wallace, S. (2018, October). Isolated Nomads Are Under Siege in the Amazon Jungle. National Geographic.