AMAZONIAN MENTAL HEALTH AT THE ICPNA ENGRAVING MUSEUM

What Lives in This Jungle is the new solo exhibition by Luna Dannon (Lima, 1996), visual artist and psychologist, at the ICPNA Engraving Museum. Curated by Giuliana Vidarte, the show brings together drypoint, etching, and aquatint prints, as well as paintings, drawings, and sculptures that, through representations of landscape and mythology, address contexts of violence in the Amazon region.

The artworks featured in the exhibition were created as an emotional response to her experience working in communities along four rivers of the Peruvian Amazon—the Marañón, Amazonas, Puinahua, and Lower Ucayali—during the pandemic. At the time, she co-led the mental health division of the Alliance for the Amazon against COVID-19 project, developed by the Amazon Hope Medical Program and CEDRO, with funding from USAID, alongside her colleague Paula Aljovín.

For several months, Luna lived and worked aboard a hospital boat operated by The Vine Trust, which traveled to 105 riverside communities. There, she provided psychological care and led workshops on sexuality, violence, and parenting in territories where access to such services is nearly nonexistent. Throughout this process, art became her form of emotional support in the face of normalized injustices and structural violence. “Making art was a mechanism for psychological survival,” the artist explains. Through drawing, she began to shape a visual narrative that is both figurative and deeply affecting.

This experience also led to a pioneering qualitative research study in Latin America, developed by Luna and Paula Aljovín, identifying the social determinants of mental health in riverside communities of the Lower Ucayali. The findings are compiled in a book bearing the same title as the exhibition, to be published at its conclusion. The book directly dialogues with the artworks, offering contextual readings of the stories symbolized within them.

“The territory bears witness to gender-based violence and, at the same time, becomes a body besieged by abuse in Luna Dannon’s works. Shadowed horizons hint at these themes, and the trunks and branches of the trees are female bodies that endure such aggressions. Mythical beings become perpetrators rooted in the forest. In this way, her artistic proposal intervenes in the pictorial tradition of the Amazonian landscape, turning this context into a haunted and embodied environment,” writes Vidarte in her curatorial text.

What Lives in This Jungle not only exhibits—it reveals. It does not portray the Amazon from an idealized or external gaze, but from an authentic and visceral experience. In this fusion of art and collective memory, Luna constructs a radically honest narrative about the issue of mental health in vulnerable regions, aiming also to contribute to the creation of spaces that make visible—and respond to—the violence and abuse that are too often silenced.

The exhibition is open to the public through August 16 at the ICPNA Museo del Grabado, Av. Javier Prado Este 4625, Surco, Lima (Peru).