A wandering artist, Paulo Nazareth (Borun Nak, Vale do Rio Doce, Brazil, born a long time ago) builds his work through walking. He derives immaterial, performative, and documentary proposals from this primary gesture. Along the paths he takes, the artist creates an archive of iconography related to colonised peoples.

From his experience as a street vendor, his work began with printing low-cost pamphlets, which were sold, along with other objects, in markets in his hometown. The multidisciplinary nature of his work emerges from this craft and others he has carried out throughout his life. Paulo Nazareth involves his body in the mercantile logic of the circulation of goods and materials — which, together with the processes of colonisation of indigenous territories (past and present), has helped build the contemporary world. In Notícias da América [News from America], one of his best-known works, he documents his journey on foot from Latin America to the United States, where he arrived to exhibit at the Art Basel Miami fair. Along the way, actions were recorded in which he explored the imaginary phenotype of the various colonised peoples, including his own.

Antropologia do negro I, 2014

Video performance, 6’05”

Antropologia do negro II, 2014

Video performance, 7’21”

Courtesy of the and Galeria Mendes Wood DM.

Video performances are central to Paulo Nazareth’s work and address the themes of wandering, migration and colonial stories. His works in this edition of the Biennial evoke a ritualistic dimension: lying on the floor, Paulo Nazareth has his head slowly covered by the skulls of anonymous bodies — a gesture that symbolically restores the right to the funeral ritual to those who were denied it, including the artist’s grandmother, compulsorily interned in a psychiatric institution in 1944. Through performative language, the artist creates ways to “carry” in himself those with whom e have historical debts, the “ragged of the world” (Paulo Freire).

When placed in a room at CAPC Sede, next to the other works that enliven the curatorial concept of this biennial, Paulo Nazareth’s video performances are capable of creating a trans-historical dialogue with the idea of phantasm proposed by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who argues that “To be haunted by a ghost is to remember what one has never lived in the present.”