Archipelago

Archipelago is an arts-and-research institute devoted to spirituality, thinking, and healing. At a constellation of sites across the globe, we host exhibitions, artists’ residencies, and a growing research library. Our inaugural site is in Germantown, NY, overlooking the Hudson River. The first exhibition brings together works Paulo Nazareth, our first artist-in-residence. 

The inaugural exhibition at Archipelago Hudson Valley was open from November 12, 2022 - February 26, 2023.

Nazareth’s residency in the Hudson Valley is a return to the endpoint of one of these journeys. Notícias de América / News from America (2010-12) was a three-year-long walk-performance from the artist’s home in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to New York City. From household to household, village to village, and city to city, Nazareth elaborated a web of interpersonal connection. During the walk, he did not wash his feet, accumulating soil from each country he passed through until he arrived in New York and dipped his feet in the Hudson River. His sandaled feet were the locus of the performance, conceptually sewing the Americas back together. 

Nazareth relies upon the immediacy of life itself to create an impression of the experience of being across the Americas. His approach blends notions of social justice and peaceful resistance, flowing between solemn contemplation and the light-hearted. Simple but poignant gestures are used to evoke personal and historical memory, observing social, political, and economic inequalities present throughout the Americas. In his work’s documented performances, social sculptures, drawings, and biographical portraits in video and film, he reveals a new vision of the Americas, one composed of many overlapping ways of being.

These are accompanied by a series of oil paintings of a nearby prison in Hudson, regularly visited by Nazareth on foot during his residency. The watchtowers and prison walls remain mute but are now reduced, turned into simple ornament. 

Photography by Jackie Furtado.

All images are courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, and New York.