An audiovisual concert
BIOFONIA
The rainforest as a concert —
made with the people who live in it.
An audiovisual concert
The rainforest as a concert —
made with the people who live in it.
The journey so far
BIOFONIA is a concert work about the rainforest, made with the people who live in it. Guaraní singers in Brazil and Kukama artists in Peru shape the songs in their own languages. Young musicians from the Amazon played it at COP30 in Belém. In Denmark, pupils, youth orchestras, choirs and audiences sing it back. Everyone who takes part is credited by name.
The Atlantic ForestBrazil, where ATLÂNTICA was written
Coral Guaray OuaCleodinei Martins Cáceres and Pedro da Silva in front of the casa de reza, Tekoá Itapuã, 2024Photo: Samantha Pearson
Inside the casa de rezaTogether with the Guaraní choir, Tekoá Itapuã, Brazil
Bjerregrav FriskolePupils who co-created the visual and dramaturgical ideas, Denmark, 2024Photo: Remulus
Animation and marimba, liveThe first staging, Viborg Animation Festival, 2024Photo: Jan Iver Larsen
Mari Luz Canaquiri MurayariShe approved the project before the lyrics were written, Loreto, 2025
Danna GaviotaRecording Parana Mamaka by the river, Peru
Marco HerreraWith children in Nauta, Peru
Radio KukamaCosmology painted on the wall of the radio station, Nauta
COP30, BelémRonni Kot Wenzell with the youth orchestra of Fundação Amazônica de Música, 11 November 2025Photo: Atanásio / Gaynett / Ribeiro
After the concertThe orchestra, conductor, soloist and composer, Belém, 2025
Nordjysk PigekorIn rehearsal, working with the Kukama-Kukamiria language, 2026
Naturmødet, HirtshalsCovering their mouths, for a language under threat in the Amazon, 2026Photo: Hans Ravn
The audience sings in GuaraníLaura Tolbøll performs ATLÂNTICA with animation by Ouros Animation, Naturmødet, 2026Photo: Hans Ravn
The work
The Atlantic Forest of Brazil, made with the Guaraní ensemble Coral Guaray Oua. The audience learns to sing peme'en jevy in Guaraní. Commissioned by Ronni Kot Wenzell. See the movement →
The Peruvian Amazon, built on Parana Mamaka — written by Pablo Eli Taricuarima Piñedo, sung by Danna Gaviota, and sung along by the audience in Kukama. The animation is made in Loreto in 2027. Commissioned by Viborg Animation Festival. See the movement →
The Pacific rainforest of Costa Rica, planned with partners there, after the work of the conservation pioneer Karen Mogensen. Planned · approx. 10–12 min.
Watch
Watch BIOFONIA live in Belém and Denmark, alongside the first animated studies for AMAZÔNICA. Click any film to play. Music is in the bar at the bottom of the page.
In their own words
From conversations recorded in Nauta and Iquitos in May 2025, lightly edited from speech. Quoted by name, with their consent.
"For the Kukama people, my people, the river is much more than a body of water: it is life, and the home of many of us — not only the fish and the dolphins, but our brothers and our families who live in those places. The production also expresses the worry we Kukama have about how the river is, how it feels, what is happening to it. We want to care for the river and protect it." Danna Gaviota · Kukama singer-songwriter, NautaVoice and protagonist of AMAZÔNICA
"Come and live with the Kukama in their own village and take part in what they do. Don't show yourself powerful or rich — to know better, show yourself vulnerable. To know what is authentic you have to experience it; otherwise we are only looking at it as a study, a theory." Pablo Eli Taricuarima Piñedo · Kukama Kukamiria poetHis advice to anyone coming from outside — asked how people who are not Kukama can interpret the stories of the Amazon
Danna and Pablo shape how Kukama language, stories and cosmology appear in the work. It grows out of our conversations with them: a meeting between Latin American, Danish and European ways of thinking. How the work is made in Loreto →
The image
This is the reverse of the usual film-scoring relationship, and it is a defining feature of BIOFONIA: the animation is not made to be illustrated by music, and the music is not written under a finished film. The score is finished, and the image grows on it. Ouros Animation holds the visual direction across the movements.
The rainforest is colour, movement and atmosphere rather than drawn trees and animals. Live-action film shows you the forest; abstract animation makes you imagine it, and with the music you enter it. Against that, a single character carries the story — in AMAZÔNICA, a Kukama girl travelling through the five worlds of Kukama cosmology.
The animation is projected during the live performance and runs with the players. It can also be shown alone, and the music can be played alone — but together they are strongest.
AMAZÔNICA · the first images, 2025
Seven young European women directors made the first animated studies for AMAZÔNICA in 2025, with Pablo Eli Taricuarima Piñedo and Marco Herrera taking part from Iquitos. See the seven studies →
Where it has been
The music was written in the rainforest. In November 2025 it was played back to it — by young musicians from the Amazon, in Belém, during the UN climate summit. Six months later a girls' choir in North Jutland sang it in Kukama.
Sala Augusto Meira Filho, four in the afternoon, free admission and a full hall. Seventy young musicians from the youth orchestra of Fundação Amazônica de Música played ATLÂNTICA and AMAZÔNICA under conductor Renan Cardoso, with Ronni Kot Wenzell on marimba — music about the rainforest, performed by people who live in it. Denmark's parliamentary delegation to COP30 and Denmark's UN youth delegates were in the audience. The following evening, excerpts were performed at the Danish dinner in Belém, with H.M. Queen Mary, ministers Jacob Jensen and Lars Aagaard and the Danish delegation present.
After the concert every musician was given a BIOFONIA cap, and they made the CHIVI sign of the Guaraní with it — the jaguar that is called on at the end of ATLÂNTICA, and the figure on the poster for the concert. Music from one rainforest, played by young people from another.
Every performance in Denmark has been for and with young people: 220 in the hall in Viborg, the outreach group and the 150 pupils of Bjerregrav Friskole, the singers and players in North Jutland. That is the model — and it is what the pitches for Antalya and Aalborg build on.
Then the work came home. In January 2026 DR P2 broadcast live excerpts from Belém. Through the winter Nordjysk Pigekor worked with the songs in a series of workshops — the Kukama pronunciation, a Danish version of one movement — and on 30 May they gave the Danish premiere at Naturmødet in Hirtshals, where Adriano, one of BIOFONIA's partners from the Amazon, stood on the same stage.
"The thought that we are singing in a language that may be dying out, but is still spoken by people deep inside the Amazon, is actually rather moving. There are real people behind this language, and the songs we sing are some of their songs." Christina Kjærulff · Conductor, Nordjysk PigekorLigeHer.nu, 31 May 2026 · excerpts, translated from Danish
Every performance
Pre-premiere · Musikteatret Viborg
Kulturmødet Mors
Viborg Animation Festival
COP30 concert · Belém, Brazil
Belém · Danish Embassy dinner
Denmark Pavilion · COP30 Blue Zone
COP30 Green Zone
DR P2
Danish premiere · Naturmødet, Hirtshals
Coverage
"BIOFONIA makes this reality tangible. It brings to life the deep interdependence between people and the Earth's life-supporting systems. At a time when division and short-term interests too often dominate, culture, and especially music, can cut through. It creates a shared space where we listen, connect and recognise what is at stake. Not through arguments, but through experience." Anne Højer Simonsen · Senior Vice President for Climate, Green Transition and Energy, Danish Industry (DI)From DI's endorsement of BIOFONIA
"It's hugely exciting to be allowed to sing a song that means so much to some people. We know how much it means to them over there — and music can do something quite special, whether you understand the words or not. There is an emotional connection in it." Karoline Kildahl · Second soprano, Nordjysk PigekorLigeHer.nu, 31 May 2026 · excerpts, translated from Danish
"With BIOFONIA we seek to approach the difficult conversations about global sustainable development — the central theme of COP30 — through art and culture." Anders Hentze · then Country Director, Danish Cultural Institute BrazilPortal Guarany Júnior, 11 November 2025 · translated from Portuguese
“Sometimes, if you want people to protect the forest, you have to make them love the forest.” Gry Bossen · Project Manager, Forest-Friendly Foods, Vegetarian Society of DenmarkThe COP30 panel “Art as a Catalyst for Climate Engagement”, Denmark Pavilion, Belém, 19 November 2025
“… a cultural connecting tool like music and animation. Here you really get the chance to rebuild the belief that things can look different. … If you cannot imagine it, can you fight for it?” Rosa Pedersen · Denmark’s youth delegate to the UN on climate and environmentNaturmødet, Hirtshals, 30 May 2026
“Our project only makes sense if it also makes sense to the partners we work with.” Mathias Madsen Munch · composer, BIOFONIAThe talk on the LEARN stage, Naturmødet, Hirtshals, 29 May 2026
"BIOFONIA is an outstanding example of how art and culture can open new sensory channels and perspectives on the meaning of nature — locally and globally." Leif Lund Jakobsen · Director of NaturmødetNordsøPosten, 30 January 2026 · translated from Danish
"Very beautiful — it speaks to both the mind and the heart. Combined with Verdens Skove, it was very captivating. It touched both me and my 7-year-old son. The target audience is very broad." Anne Maj Geyti · Leadership Partner, The Animation Workshop · VIA University CollegeMusikteatret Viborg, September 2024 · from BIOFONIA's documentation
"Both myself and my art students were very excited. The combination of music and animation worked really well as a way to communicate your cause, and several students later described how deeply moved they were by the performance. My students fit perfectly into the target audience." Mikkel Skovborg · Teacher in the Arts Programme, Husby EfterskoleMusikteatret Viborg, September 2024 · from BIOFONIA's documentation
"It was genius to blend music, presentations, and animation in such a way. We found ourselves nudging each other at times because it was so well done. Most of us are over 80 years old, so it might not connect with us in the same way it would with younger people. Afterward, we talked about how we might have felt a bit 'ashamed' … or rather, it made us reflect on the fact that, as a society, we haven't taken better care of the world and nature. Not so much on a personal level — it's hard to make a big difference as an individual — but as a generation." Lithen Agerbo · Study group, LOFMusikteatret Viborg, September 2024 · from BIOFONIA's documentation
Our future
The image of AMAZÔNICA is completed in Loreto in the spring of 2027, with Kukama artists, visual artists from Loreto, a Peruvian animation studio and around a hundred young people — then presented free of charge in Iquitos and Nauta. In 2028 Aalborg Symphony Orchestra plans to perform the full work for schoolchildren in North Jutland. The orchestra and Ouros Animation have done this before: Mossy Mogens (Mosbefængte Mogens), 2024, an animated concert on the Nordic forest with live animation above the orchestra, for 4,744 children in a single week. The finished animation is intended as the visual heart of TOCANTA, a free online educational material in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Danish, applied for and pending. The Loreto plan in full →
Proposals
Partners
Supported by · partners
The outreach programme in Denmark was funded by OpEn — the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Information and Engagement Fund, managed by CISU. The COP30 concert was supported by Statens Kunstfond, Kulturstyrelsen, Dansk Solistforbund, Dansk Kapelmesterforening and the Danish Cultural Institute. The full orchestral version with choir is arranged with support from Augustinus Fonden.
Contact
mathias@biofonia.org
