Artist Bel Falleiros in Pecos National Historical Park

ARTIST BEL FALLEIROS IN PECOS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK
Bel Falleiros, a Brazilian installation artist, was selected by the National Parks Arts Foundation(NPAF) to be the 2016 Artist-in-Residence at Pecos National Historical Park, a multi-unit park that contains the remnants of the once vibrant Pecos Pueblo. Located just a half hour outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico between the town of Pecos and the historic Glorieta Battlefield, the park launched this cooperative venture with NPAF to bring artists to Pecos to work and interact with the public. Hear her Big Blend Radio interview below.

Artist Bel Falleiros combines the varied practices of land art, urbanism and architecture, psycho-geography, and expressive wandering to uncover the spirit of a particular place. This process takes different forms — installations, guided tours, journaling, documentation — all for the sake of something Falleiros calls ‘deep truth’ art research.  She says: “For me personally, it will be a great chance to fuse research procedures that I normally do separately: walking through a landscape, exploring its local history, creating artworks by relating to its spatial dimensions and materials…”

Her work at the site is designed to discover the poetics of a particular place, sometimes with the help of the public, other times working alone with elements found or suggested by the location. Falleiros brings a unique background to her art practice. Trained originally as an architect, she is influenced by the site-specific Arte Povera modernism of Lina Bo Bardi, as well as the pioneering land art of Nancy Holt, and the Land-Based Poetics and Conscious Strolling and Performance works of Francis Alÿs. This mix of influences results in an ever-changing organic practice that is open to all sorts of collaborations and influences. She further expands on this idea, adding: “The arts that most interest me are the ones that are broad enough to engage a great range of people and cultures. In that sense they are more like elemental art, an art that can survive through time and dialogue with works that came previously and will come in the future.”

In addition, she is interested in what exactly visitors and park personnel bring to the collective work of interpretation of such a powerful historical place as Pecos NHP. “I also think it is very valuable — and rare — to find those works of art that can promote silence and the possibility for the audience to be active as they perceive it, giving the audience itself space to complement the work. In that sense, in my practice I give value to the process as part of the art work, to make available to my audience the possibility to experience and investigate.”

It is rare, Falleiros feels, for an artist to concentrate all she does in a tight circle of space and time. “And furthermore, it is a great chance for me to fuse research procedures that I normally do separately: walking through a landscape, exploring its local history, creating artworks by relating to its spatial dimensions and materials. And more than that, Pecos is such a beautiful and unique place, full of layers of human presence and historic importance, it is a unique experience to have a place like that as my studio!”

Learn more about Bel Falleiros at https://belfalleiros.com.br/

Pecos National Historical Park originated in 1960 as a National Historic Landmark, to preserve the core of the Pueblo of Ciquique (Pecos) and its Mission, la Mission de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula de los Pecos, and over the last 30 years has grown to include the famed Glorieta Pass Battlefield, which was the site of the famed ‘Gettysburg of the West’, were Union Forces defeated a larger and better trained Confederate force from Texas that was moving north to capture Coloradan gold fields. Learn more at www.NPS.gov/peco

The National Parks Arts Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated nationwide to the promotion of the National Parks of the U.S. by creating dynamic opportunities for artworks that are based in our natural and historic heritage. This project is supported entirely by donations from citizen lovers of the Arts, and generous partnerships. For more information visit www.nationalparksartsfoundation.org.

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