Untitled, from white ethnography series

The peripatetic Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth draws on his joint African and Indigenous heritage to perform restorative gestures that aim to return neglected histories of the Global South. In the “white ethnography series,” Nazareth collected black-and-white portraits of African communities from the internet. He then printed these on cotton paper, a support referencing the cotton trading routes, resource extraction in the African colonies, and plantation slavery. Faded, illegible, and de-individualized portraits emerge through the process of printing on cotton paper: neither faces nor objects, postures, and settings can be clearly identified as their contours and traits remain out of focus. The images are further obfuscated by white circles hand-drawn with efun, a chalk used for various cultural purposes in the Olukumi community. The process of veiling images depicting a specific Black subjectivity generates a sense of opacity that problematizes the concept of transparency in ethnographic research.

In Poetics of Relation (1990), poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant speaks of opacity as a tool for resisting approaches to knowledge that argue for the transparency of the “other”—a patronizing act that reduces the singularity and complexity of the subject, encouraging his/her objectification and subjection. The “white ethnography series” opens a critical reflection on the representation of Black persons and the residues of a colonial gaze stemming from and reinforcing Western cultural, geopolitical, and financial hegemony. Nazareth reverses a white ethnographic project by reclaiming and restoring images charged with colonial, scientific, and cultural memory.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)