Caxiuanã Expedition

Caxiuanã Bay, Pará State, Brazil

The Amazon is more than a forest—it’s a cultural landscape, shaped by millennia of human and non-human interactions.

Expedição Caxiuanã is a hands-on workshop that brings together local students from the Amazon and international students from MIT to explore these connections through new media and immersive storytelling, fostering new imaginaries and languages for this landscape.

Set deep in the rainforest at the Ferreira Penna Science Station, the expedition will be a space for experimentation, where science, art, and ancestral wisdom converge.

At this key moment to reinvent our relationship with the biosphere, radical imagination is our greatest ally. Coexistence isn’t just the process—it’s the story itself, shaping new ways to see, sense, and imagine the future of our inhabited world.

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Ferreira Penna Scientific Station (ECFP)

The Ferreira Penna Scientific Station (ECFPn) is a research facility located in the Caxiuanã National Forest, in the state of Pará. Situated in a preserved area of 330,000 hectares of tropical forest, it is accessible only by boat, requiring a 24-hour journey from Belém do Pará. This physical research facility is where the workshop takes place, with its staff and students becoming part of the team.

Operated under Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, the station supports multiple studies on the socio-biodiversity of the Amazon. Research at the station spans multiple disciplines, including Botany, Zoology, Earth Sciences, Ecology, Archaeology, and Human Sciences.

Theme 2025: Amazonia, Cultural Forest

Each edition has a central theme aligned with ongoing research at the station—botanical, zoological, sociocultural, and geological—and explore a new digital media technique with the students.

In 2025, the theme is “Amazon, Cultural Forest,” focusing on the cultural dimensions of the forest. Inhabited and shaped by human civilizations for millennia, the Amazonia cannot be separated from its inhabitants, being a vast socio-bio-cultural monument.

Participants will document archaeological objects, architectural elements, and everyday artifacts from local communities, creating immersive mini-documentaries that reflect their perspectives on the theme.

New Media Storytelling and Digital Archive

Students will explore 3D scanning techniques, capturing and processing objects within a gaming engine. The models will serve as a base to create experimental immersive pieces created by the students. The goal is to merge technological innovation with visual storytelling, uncovering new ways to understand and represent the rainforest.

This process contributes to the development of a digital archive, preserving elements of the region’s cultural and ecological heritage—an essential effort given the scarcity of existing digital assets representing this unique environment.