In Algebra, Paulo Nazareth transforms movement into methodology, using the idea of tracing fractured histories as his method. This connects Venice, Veneza, Africa and the Americas through repair, relation and ancestral memory, with ‘algebra’ serving as a metaphor for bringing together broken or separated parts of history and memory.
Suzette Bell-Roberts
20 June 2026
There are artists who make objects, and there are artists whose work and life are inseparable. Paulo Nazareth belongs emphatically to the latter. For more than two decades, the Brazilian artist has transformed movement into methodology. His practice unfolds through journeys, conversations, encounters and acts of observation that challenge the line between art and life. Photography, sculpture, drawing, installation and performance appear in his work, but none can be fully understood without recognising that Nazareth often occupies the centre of the equation. His body is witness, archive, instrument and medium. It collects experiences across territories and carries them from one place to another. While much contemporary art remains bound to the studio, Nazareth’s practice emerges from roads, border crossings, kitchens, markets, religious ceremonies, and countless exchanges between strangers.
To speak of Paulo Nazareth is to speak of an artist whose body was a work of art before entering the museum. His daily life unfolds as a continuous artistic performance. Walking, listening, collecting and remembering become creative acts. Driven by the enduring question—where exactly is art?—he treats the world as a vast field of aesthetic and political possibility. Art appears not just in objects or institutions but in gestures, conversations, acts of care, survival rituals and the improvised strategies communities use to navigate inequality. The works that enter museums and collections are often visible traces of a much larger process. This process begins elsewhere—on roads, in kitchens, in encounters, and in the fragile yet enduring relationships connecting people and place.
In this context, Algebra is less a discrete exhibition than the latest articulation of a philosophy Nazareth has pursued for decades. The project centres its concerns on movement as methodology, relation as knowledge, and repair as the ongoing work of reconnecting histories fractured by colonialism.
In the course of our conversation, Nazareth repeatedly returned to the word that gives the exhibition its title. Speaking in English, he explained that, through years of travelling across the Americas, Africa and Europe, he had learned that algebra existed long before mathematics. “We take the language and recreate it,” he reflected. “This is part of the algebra. Algebra, it’s a movement. It’s mathematics, but it’s before mathematics.”
The observation reveals a fundamental aspect of his practice. Words, like people, migrate. Meanings shift. Histories accumulate. The Arabic al-jabr—the reunion of broken parts and the setting of broken bones—becomes, in Nazareth’s hands, a way of understanding a world ruptured by colonialism, slavery, displacement and environmental violence. Returning to the idea several times throughout our discussion, he distilled the exhibition’s central concern into a single question: “How is the equation after they colonised it? What can we do to save our human spirit?”
That question lingers throughout Algebra.
Algebra is more than a title; it’s the way Nazareth approaches history. Standard algebra isolates and resolves variables. Nazareth’s approach is relational. It reunites what was violently separated: continents, languages, memories, spiritual systems, communities, and histories. Instead of solving for the unknown, he examines relationships that outlast rupture. As he says, “Algebra is put together in conversation, because colonisation broke our life, broke nature.” This phrase sums up the exhibition’s belief: repair starts with relation, not certainty.
Long before Nazareth encountered the Arabic origins of al-jabr, he was already living its principles. The idea that broken things might be reassembled, that discarded materials might carry hidden value, and that meaning emerges through relation rather than possession was embedded within his childhood. Throughout our conversation, he returned repeatedly to the example of his mother, Ana Gonçalves da Silva, whose daily journeys through Belo Horizonte provided the earliest lessons that would later become central to his artistic philosophy.
Ana worked as a street cleaner, walking between the city’s margins and its commercial centre. Along those routes, she collected objects discarded by others—broken tools, scraps of metal, fragments of plastic and abandoned materials—which she carried home not as rubbish but as possibility. These remnants became toys, tools and inventions for her children. Nazareth frequently recalls one of those inventions: a broken toy Volkswagen that he repaired using wheels cut from discarded Havaianas sandals. Looking back, it feels almost inevitable that an artist preoccupied with repair, transformation and reassembly would emerge from such an environment.
The story reveals a fundamental aspect of his practice. In his mother’s hands, what the city rejected acquired new life. Waste became a resource. Absence became a possibility. The kitchen became an archive. The domestic became political. The everyday revealed its capacity to shelter the sacred. Long before entering museums and biennials, Nazareth was learning that materials carry multiple truths simultaneously—economic, spiritual, ancestral and historical.
This lesson continues to structure his work. Every journey, every collected object and every conversation ultimately returns to that foundational understanding that value often resides precisely where dominant systems fail to recognise it. His art is not interested in the monumental so much as the overlooked. It concerns the fragments’ history and the relationships hidden within them.
This concern with relation finds perhaps its most compelling expression in the exhibition’s dual structure. Nazareth resisted treating Venice and Veneza as separate sites, instead describing them as interconnected points within a larger equation. “When I make algebra, it’s put these two places together: Venice, Italy, Veneza, Ribeirão das Neves,” he explained. As he spoke, the geography expanded outward, encompassing Venezuela—“little Venice”—and then broader histories linking America, Africa and Asia. The pairing is deceptively simple. Venice holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. Centuries of maritime commerce made it a symbol of trade, empire, and cultural prestige. Veneza, by contrast, is a neighbourhood in Ribeirão das Neves.
This area is often associated with labour migration, social inequality and one of Brazil’s largest prison systems. Yet Nazareth refuses to draw a familiar line between centre and periphery. He reveals both places as products of the same historical processes. The distinction becomes increasingly important as Venice’s historical role as an exchange hub grows. For centuries, this city stood as a gateway. Commodities, people, ideas, and wealth circulated among Europe, Africa, and Asia through it. Venice earned prestige from its role in these commercial networks. These networks helped shape the modern world. Veneza, by contrast, has a very different position in Brazil. It is defined by labour migration, social precarity and uneven urban development. Yet Nazareth refuses to let these differences create hierarchy. Instead, he shows that both locations reveal key aspects of the same historical systems. One emerged through wealth from circulation; the other bears witness to the consequences of these systems. Through Nazareth’s algebra, Venice and Veneza cease to be opposites. They become relational points within a larger Atlantic history. ory.
This approach recalls Nazareth’s broader insistence that history cannot be interpreted in isolation. Places are produced through movement. Cities emerge through networks of exchange. Communities are shaped by journeys, migrations and encounters that exceed national borders. The dual structure of Algebra, therefore, challenges the logic of separation itself. Venice and Veneza are not presented as opposites but as participants in a shared and unfinished Atlantic history.
What initially appears as a simple coincidence of names gradually reveals a deeper connection: Venice and Veneza become mirrors, reflecting and illuminating one another. Here, ‘mirrors’ means each city provides insight into the other, highlighting parallel histories of circulation, extraction, labour, and displacement that span the Atlantic and connect places often considered separate. This is why Nazareth repeatedly insisted that the exhibition exists “in the time, not in the place.” This phrase confronts conventional notions of geography by suggesting that Venice and Veneza are not merely physical locations; rather, they serve as temporal portals—gateways through time—through which colonial histories continue to reverberate today.
The Atlantic itself occupies a central place within this proposition. Throughout our conversation, Nazareth navigated easily between continents and temporalities, tracing links where others might perceive distance. The Atlantic, in his telling, is never merely an ocean. It is a repository of movement, memory and encounter. Histories of enslavement, migration, trade and resistance continue to circulate within its waters, linking communities separated by geography but connected through experience. The exhibition’s dual structure, therefore, functions not as a comparison between two places but as a challenge to the very logic through which places are separated and ranked.
Movement has always occupied a central place within Nazareth’s work, but it would be a mistake to understand his journeys as symbolic performances. Walking functions as a methodology. Roads become archives. Borders become questions. Encounters become forms of knowledge. Through movement, the artist accesses histories that remain invisible within formal narratives.
For years, Nazareth has crossed the Americas, the Caribbean and the African continent, often on foot, following routes travelled by generations of migrants, refugees and undocumented travellers. These journeys are neither acts of endurance nor romantic gestures. They are forms of embodied research through which the artist encounters the lived realities of racialisation, displacement and inequality. His body becomes both witness and archive, carrying experiences from one territory to another.
His celebrated project Notícias de América emerged from a ten-month walk from Brazil to New York and remains one of the clearest expressions of this methodology. Yet even here, the work is not fundamentally about the journey in itself. Rather, it concerns the structures that govern mobility. Through countless encounters across the Americas, Nazareth exposes the invisible systems that determine who may move freely and who becomes trapped within bureaucratic categories.
Throughout our discussion, he returned repeatedly to the body as an archive. His body collects memories, conversations, stories and observations that later reappear as artworks. It becomes a site where histories accumulate. The artist carries experiences across borders much as others might carry documents. Movement becomes a means of remembering.
What distinguishes Nazareth from many artists working with questions of migration and colonial memory is his refusal to treat these subjects as themes that can be represented from a distance. Knowledge, in his understanding, is produced through encounter. One must travel, listen, observe and participate. The artist does not stand outside history in order to interpret it; he moves through it, allowing its contradictions and complexities to reveal themselves through lived experience.
The body occupies a crucial position within this process. Distances travelled, encounters experienced, and borders crossed accumulate as forms of memory. In this sense, the artist’s body functions as an alternative archive, one capable of preserving tales and events that rarely enter official records. This understanding runs throughout his work, which consistently privileges lived experience over abstraction and encounter over representation.
Such an approach recalls the work of critical geographers who have argued that borders do not simply divide territory but vigorously shape human lives. Nazareth’s journeys reveal precisely these dynamics. The border becomes something that passes through bodies, determining access, movement and belonging. Yet his work also reveals the forms of solidarity that emerge in response: collective meals, conversations, acts of generosity and networks of care that remain despite systems designed to fragment them. If colonialism sought to divide, Nazareth’s practice seeks to trace the relations that survive.
Language occupies an equally important position within this project. At one point, he laughed as he described his relationship with English. “I learn English on the road,” he said. The remark reveals more than humour. It encapsulates a philosophy of language grounded in encounter rather than authority. Throughout his travels, words act as tools of relation, continually transformed through use. “We take the language and recreate it,” he explained.
The observation resonates deeply with his broader engagement with naming. Throughout our conversation, Nazareth repeatedly challenged the apparent neutrality of maps and categories. Names, he suggested, carry histories. They reveal power. They shape memory. This concern extends to his invocation of terms such as Al-Kebulan, a precolonial name for Africa, and Abya Yala, an Indigenous name for the Americas.
When discussing Africa, Nazareth’s language became noticeably more expansive. Rather than describing a continent bounded by political borders, he spoke of an ancestral and spiritual geography that still shapes diasporic identities across the Atlantic world. “When we talk about Africa, it is this ancestral place, the point we have in common,” he reflected. “Africa is a spiritual land, an ancestral land.”
Listening to Nazareth speak about Africa, one becomes aware that he is describing something significantly broader than geography. His reflections move continuously between territory, ancestry, spirituality and memory, revealing a conception of Africa that exceeds the political boundaries inherited from colonial cartography. Africa appears not only as a continent but as a field of relation extending across the diaspora, connecting communities through histories that remain unfinished. It is neither distant nor symbolic. Rather, it persists within languages, spiritual practices, foodways, rituals and systems of knowledge that continue to circulate throughout the Atlantic world.
This understanding resonates deeply with Nazareth’s Borun Nak ancestry and with the histories of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities throughout Brazil. Such histories resist the neat divisions imposed by colonial categories. Instead, they reveal worlds organised through relationships between people, rivers, mountains, ancestors and living landscapes. The Watu—the Rio Doce—occupies such a position within Borun cosmology. It is not simply a river but a living presence, a carrier of memory and a participant in collective life. Throughout Nazareth’s work, landscapes function in much the same way. Roads, rivers and oceans are never passive settings. They are repositories of experience, witnesses to migration, violence, resilience and survival.
His invocation of Al-Kebulan is therefore significant. By returning to names that predate colonial occupation, Nazareth is not indulging in nostalgia. He is opening a space for alternative understandings of history and belonging to emerge. Renaming becomes a form of repair, restoring visibility to worlds colonial systems attempted to erase.
Perhaps the most illuminating concept to emerge from our conversation was Nazareth’s description of his practice as arte de preceito. The phrase resists easy translation. Preceito suggests something more meaningful than a rule or instruction. It implies an ethical commitment, a responsibility that cannot merely be abandoned when convenient. As Nazareth explained, a promise can be broken, but a preceito cannot.
The distinction is revealing because it shifts attention away from artistic production and towards artistic responsibility. Art becomes less a matter of creating objects than of maintaining relationships—with communities, ancestors, landscapes and forms of knowledge that exceed the individual artist. This perspective helps explain why so much of Nazareth’s work revolves around listening rather than speaking, gathering rather than claiming, and connecting rather than categorising.
“Today I say my art is arte de preceito,” he told me. “It’s about our relationship: people, human, spiritual, life. It’s a relationship with the sacred and science.”
The statement reveals the extent to which Nazareth refuses the binaries that have long structured Western systems of knowledge. Spirituality and rationality are not opposites. Science and ritual are not opposites. Nature and culture are not opposites. Instead, they form part of a larger continuum of relations. Knowledge emerges through conversation among these domains rather than through their separation.
This grasp helps explain why Nazareth’s work often resists straightforward interpretation. Rather than presenting fixed meanings, it creates conditions for relationships to be activated. The viewer is invited not simply to observe but to participate, entering into networks of memory and responsibility that reach beyond the exhibition itself. Art becomes less a matter of representation than of stewardship.
In a contemporary art world frequently driven by visibility, spectacle and production, such a position feels quietly radical. Nazareth proposes a practice grounded not in ownership but in care. The artist’s role is not simply to produce objects but to maintain relationships with ancestors, communities, landscapes, and forms of knowledge that extend beyond the individual self. This understanding transforms art from a site of consumption into a space of ethical engagement. The work asks not what we see but how we relate.
One of the most affecting moments in our exchange came when the conversation turned towards South Africa. Nazareth spoke passionately about the need for stronger cultural relationships between Brazil and the African continent, particularly those that bypass traditional routes through Europe and North America. The Atlantic, he suggested, should not be understood as a barrier but as a connective space.
“We are so close,” he reflected. “It’s like the Atlantic is a river. But sometimes we don’t have the boat.”
The image is quintessentially Nazareth. It transforms geography into a metaphor while retaining its political force. The Atlantic becomes a river connecting histories of migration, enslavement, resistance and cultural interaction. The challenge lies not in distance itself but in creating the infrastructures—cultural, intellectual and political—that allow those relationships to flourish.
In a moment defined by hardening borders, ecological collapse, renewed forms of nationalism and growing social fragmentation, Algebra feels unexpectedly urgent. Rather than offering solutions, Nazareth proposes a different way of approaching the world. His practice asks what becomes possible when relation replaces separation as the organising principle of thought; when movement is understood not as threat but as knowledge; when memory is treated not as an encumbrance but as a resource; and when repair is recognised as an ongoing collective responsibility.
As our conversation drew to a close, Nazareth returned once more to the idea that had animated our discussion from the outset. Algebra, he suggested, is fundamentally about conversation because “colonisation broke our life, broke nature.”
In Venice and Veneza, across the Atlantic and beyond, Algebra becomes an attempt to bring those fragments back into relation. The equations Nazareth proposes are not mathematical. They are human. They unfold between places, between generations, between languages and across oceans. They emerge through movement, memory and encounter. Most importantly, they remind us that repair is not a destination but a practice—an ongoing act of recognising the relationships that persist beneath the fractures of history and imagining how they might once again be brought into conversation.
The equations persist open, unfinished and contingent, inviting us to participate in the labour of reconnection. In this sense, Algebra is ultimately less an exhibition than a proposition: that another geography of relations already exists beneath the fractures of history, waiting to be recognised.
Suzette Bell-Roberts is the editor and co-founder of ART AFRICA.
