Paulo Nazareth's open-ended practice emerges from his improvisational wan-derings through various countries for extended periods of time. These journeys can be described as durational performances, in which he draws on his mixed African, Caucasian, and Indigenous heritage to establish personal bonds with local communities-particularly in Africa and Latin America-who are affected by the legacy of a colonial past, and whose culture and history has often been suppressed or erased by hegemonic discourses. Playing with his own mestizo background and the shifting way his racial identity is perceived depending on the context, Nazareth alternately presents himself as an "exotic other" and as a member of whatever group he associates himself with during his peram-bulations. He chronicles and organizes his experiences in works that include the elements of ephemera, photographs, drawings, videos, and texts; much of this material is made available online in the blogs he maintains while traveling.

In one of his best-known projects, Notícias de América (News from America), Nazareth, wearing flip-flops, walked from his home in the outskirts of Belo Horizonte across several countries to the United States, a journey that lasted more than six months. As a symbolic ritual at the end of his trip, he rinsed the dust of all the countries he had visited off his feet into the Hudson River in New York. This project was followed by Cadernos de África (Africa Notebooks), 2013, another walk of epic proportions, this time from Cape Town north across the African continent, in search of "what there is of Africa in my home country," as he blogged.

In the investigation of his own identity, Nazareth has explored vast territories, guided by lived experience and intense social exchange, producing a politically charged yet delicate and humorous body of work that traces unsuspected correspondences between communities linked by shared histories.

- Kiki Mazzucchelli