Giant mural in Sao Paulo uses ash from wildfires to highlight deforestation

By Amanda Perobelli and Lais Morais

SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Brazilian street artist Mundano's latest work incorporates ash from forest fires and mud from flooding in Brazil to create a giant mural pleading for a stop to deforestation.

The mural was inaugurated on Wednesday on the side of an 11-floor building in the center of Latin America's largest city, adding a colorful and pointed message to Sao Paulo's rich collection of graffiti.

The 48-meter (157-ft) by 30-meter (98-ft) work depicts tree stumps of a burnt-down forest and the face of an Indigenous woman holding a sign in English that reads: "Stop the Destruction."

The mural was painted with colors made with the ash from forest fires in Brazil, including the Amazon, where swathes of rainforest have been destroyed by recent blazes in the worst drought on record. Mundano told Reuters he also used mud from massive flooding in southern Brazil earlier this year.

The woman depicted in the mural is Indigenous leader Alessandra Korap Munduruku, who led a successful campaign to stop multinational mining companies prospecting on her tribe's ancestral lands in the Amazon, for which she won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2023.

Mundano said his mural is intended as a protest against businesses that have pushed the agricultural frontier into the Amazon rainforest with large-scale soy plantations and cattle ranching for beef, which have made Brazil one of the world's top food exporters.

The mural specifically targets U.S. grain trader Cargill Inc, temporarily painting the names of Cargill family members on the mural. Mundano said he wanted the Cargill family who owns the company to keep its word that it would remove deforestation from its supply chain.

Cargill has pledged to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain of key row crops in Brazil by 2025 and from its South American soy supply chain by 2030.

"We are on track to deliver on that commitment," Cargill said in a statement, adding that the mural was based on inaccurate information.

"The fact is Cargill accelerated its commitment to eliminate deforestation and land conversion from our direct and indirect supply chains of soy, corn, wheat and cotton in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay by 2025," the statement said.

Along with ash and mud, Mundano used clay from Indigenous reservations that have struggled to get their land rights recognized, often in conflicts with farmers. The mural also features paint made from urucum, a red tropical fruit used as body paint by Amazon tribes.

"This is perhaps the largest mural ever made with natural pigments," said Mundano as he mixed paints for the work.

"The names we are writing here are of billionaires who still live in a model based on the destruction of ecosystem biomes and contribute to the climate emergency," he said.

The mural is a collaboration with the conservation nonprofit Stand.earth, who funded the project.

(Reporting by Amanda Perobelli and Lais Morais, writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)