SANTIAGO, Chile — An award-winning investigation by Mongabay that revealed water contamination from oil palm plantations in Indigenous territories in the Brazilian Amazon was featured at an art installation at UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day Conference in Santiago this month. The artwork was also exhibited at Chile’s Museum of Contemporary Art. A supermarket cart, tipping over under a mountain of products and spilling waste in river water — represented by melted plastic bottles — was placed at the entrance of the main pavilion of the Gabriela Mistral Library, where UNESCO’s event took place from May 3-4. Inspired by the Mongabay investigation, theater design students from the University of Chile worked together with this reporter to create the concept of an art exhibition to highlight the hidden environmental damages of “sustainable” palm oil coming from the many products found in grocery stores that consumers buy with no awareness of the impacts. “Here are all the things that we people go to the supermarket, take the offers, take the sales — oferta in Spanish — we just take them from the supermarket and put them in our cart. And we see here the cart is already full and it spills everything else, it spills all the contamination that’s coming from the palm oil industry,” says Cristian Canto, manager of the artwork, explaining that the plastic bottles represent the Amazon region visited by this reporter and the red light points to the Turé-Mariquita Indigenous Territory featured in the investigation. “And we see how…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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