Amazonia was the first museum exhibition I ever worked on. I was still an intern, had never done anything like it before, and somehow ended up as the sole graphic designer. It was a huge learning curve and I loved it.

The curator, Nuno Porto, was very clear from the beginning that he didn’t want another exhibition about the Amazon that leaned on ideas of lushness, mystery or the exotic. The show was about Indigenous peoples, political realities, environmental threats and the complexity of the region itself. That pushed the graphics in a much more direct direction. The labels became almost documentary in tone: clean, straightforward and there to carry a lot of difficult information.

The title treatment was the part I cared about most. My first instinct was to keep it simple, but the more I worked on it, the more wrong that felt. The Amazon is huge, complicated and made up of so many different peoples, histories and systems. I wanted the wordmark to feel sprawling and a little unruly, with the river connecting everything together.

It was my first exhibition, and it really did throw me straight into the deep end. I’m still very fond of it for that reason.