Rally and Woodcut Combat Desertification in the Amazon

Have you ever imagined experiencing a rally in a place where there should be a river? This is what the “Amazon Desert Rally” campaign, created by the agency Africa and the visual arts studio Black Madre, brings to draw the population's attention to the issue of desertification in the Amazon.

Developed in partnership with the indigenous Almir Narayamoga Surui, from the Paiter Suruí tribe, who contributed to the creation and dialogue with other indigenous people, the piece uses images from fictional rally within the main river of Roraima, the Rio Branco, which suffers from droughts, to draw attention and provoke a conversation around environmental problems in northern Brazil.

“The entire process was meticulously designed and thought to look like a real race. We used rally cars driven by indigenous drivers and developed uniforms with teams to look like a high-performance race in a dry river to show that there shouldn’t be cars there but fauna and flora. There are many km of dry land where it is even possible to see the piles of bridges that connect one bank to the other. The situation is sad and urgent, so we want to call on people to ‘not sponsor this rally’, to act now and reverse this reality”, commented André Maciel, director and founding partner at Black Madre.

To carry out the campaign, an entire graphic communication present in this segment was developed, with teams, symbols, signs, uniforms, car personalisation, flags, and others.

Furthermore, to intensify the message and make a movement against desertification, the visual arts studio Black Madre also developed and produced seven woodcut printed posters. With a language that brings simplicity combined with design sophistication to make this appeal, the message of the posters and the race were designed through a more graphic and direct aesthetic, elements very present in this relief engraving method, where the image is sculpted in a wooden matrix.

In this process, 1.20m x 1.75m plates were also carved to be used in OOH communications. “Mixing the simple language of woodcuts with more sophisticated design communication that sends the message directly is what creates the most interesting graphic effect for the project. When we print in woodcuts, in addition to the image itself, the matrix, as it is made of wood, carries the texture of the grain of the tree in it, an effect that we cannot control as it is something natural on the surface of the material. This in itself already carries meaning and creates an extraordinary layer in the final result. The most beautiful thing about this process is that it is organic, and each ink to produce a print is unique, as the ink and the wood grain never behave the same way. We used just one colour for printing, and we varied the colour of the paper. This process naturally gave us the colour of the paper for the entire campaign. For this reason, each print is unique and made manually one by one”, said André.