As far as the world reaches

A birdwatcher tries to record the scarce birdsongs in a deactivated mining area, while a team of ethnobotanists faces the challenges of storing one of the largest natural history collections in the world. Scientific practices from the past and present meet in the investigation of a 17th century catalogue of Brazilian plants and animals published in Amsterdam as a product of the Dutch expedition of artists and scientists in the country.

Borrowing its title from the motto of Prince Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, governor of the Dutch colony in Brazil, the film reinterprets relations between colonial expansion and ecological exhaustion through the archives of Brazilian natural history spread throughout the centuries in European collections. The recording of a long forgotten voice by the birdwatcher triggers an exploration about the everlasting effects of colonialism in the way nature is perceived and represented today.