sol archer
“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”
Dionne Brand
Currently i’m working across two projects: in one, i am focussed on the construction of whiteness and the haunting of the socio-ecological imaginary by colonial representational regimes, particularly in the conservation and continued exhibition of representations of enslavement in landscape painting from the Dutch occupation of Brazil. In the second i am making a film with a disappearing trans-mediterranean tradition of bird call imitation to register an archive of endangered birds, as they exist in a vanishing embodied folk practice. Some details of both projects are available here and here.
I also join to film, edit, produce, photograph, speak, write, document, and occasionally appear in projects for other people, you can see some of these projects here:
get in touch if you have a project you would like to talk about.
atelier sol archer:
het archief
robert fruinstraat 52
rotterdam
the netherlands
updates
April 05 2025
KYA
Museu da UFRGS
Porto Alegre, Brazil
Opening 2025/04/05, the Museu UFRGS, Porto Alegre Brazil will host the exhibition “KYA – Guarani Mbya and Jurua Weavings, Webs and Networks”. Curated by artist and researcher Lucas Icó, the exhibition is a collective construction with the group of Artists and Artisans from Tekoa Anhetengua, located in Lomba do Pinheiro, in Porto Alegre, and brings together works by indigenous and non-indigenous artists in a living web of creation, knowledge and re-existence.
“KYA”, a Guarani word that means “network” or “web” of spiders and other beings, is also a metaphor for the processes of encounter, creation and exchange between Guarani Mbya artists, researchers and thinkers from different origins. The exhibition presents works of art, sculptures, audiovisual recordings, photographs, murals, woven networks and collective experiences, reflecting on the prolonged time of creative processes and the bonds formed between people with different worldviews.
The highlights of the exhibition include works by the Teko Guarani singing group, ceramicist and sculptor Antonia Garai, weaver Rubén Franco, photographer Vherá Poty and audiovisual producer Jorge Morinico. Guarani researchers such as Laercio Karaí and Araci da Silva and non-indigenous artists and researchers such as the Ecomuseu Urbano (Cláudia Zanatta and Vado Vergara), Cristina Ribas and the English artist Sol Archer.
Opening: April 5, at 10:30 a.m.
Exhibition Span: April 7 to August 8
Opening times: Monday to Friday, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
February 13 2025
A Memory of Elephants
Metode @ Rom
Oslo & Online
For the past 9 months I have been part of the incredible Metode writing program, developing a piece of writing for 'Metode volume 3, Currents'.
A Memory of Elephants is an article taking a critical look, through ekphrasis at the cultural archive from the Dutch West Indies company colony in Brazil, and the myth of tolerance. About museums inscribing and re-inscribing racialised hierarchies from colonial fantasy and about the haunting of social and ecological imagination by fantasies of total violence, beautified by landscape; about buying reputations, sonic experiences in museums, the silencing of the world, and the invention of nature. About transmitting phantasms, the invention of the tropics, about the museum as the site of capture par excellence. About painting, Frans Post, Mauricio de Nassau, Albert Eckhout, and Culture washing. It’s about finding elephants where I didn’t expect them.
It’s about the conjuring up of whiteness and the inertia of its conservation.
Available online