The installation of Solange Fabião is a topographic path. It is defined by two walls that stand up to three feet apart from each other. This freestanding wood hallway expresses a symbolic, sensorial and imaginary route Henry Hudson took into the unknown. It sets up two forms of experience: one on ground and the other above ground.


The ground path between the parallel walls has extremely dim light. While walking inside this dark passage visitors encounter a removed voyage which provides direct contact with the land and ground itself, a micro-sample of New York’s vast upstate natural lands.


The installation draw visitor’s attention to their most tactile extremities by using one’s hands and feet to make and ensure safe passage. Juxtaposition of topography and architecture orchestrates deep passage by stimulating memory and imagination to adjust to the ground, the earth, the land.


This trajectory attempts to stimulate within the visitor a sense of physical and mental discovery – in opposition to modern experience of crossing a tunnel or a bridge, where the objective is only to go from one end to the other. Here a sensorial reading of land mirrors vicissitudes of life as journey – Henru Hudson’s, his crew or ours.


Then, in a complementary way, there is a second route on the top level: an open, above ground path approximates visitors to treetops and sky, to distant views by day and reference points like the stars at night.


The installation is a forty-two foot long path composed of two levels totaling eighty-five feet in length that equals the size of Hudson’s hull, the Half Moon. The basic height measurements for door aand handrail combined with the landscape’s topography define height and slope of the piece. A 60° angle turn divides the hallway in two parts at the twenty-two foot mark avoiding a straightforward view. The structure is made of certified wood. FSC-certified wood ensures that the wood is from a well-managed forest and the company manufacturing the wood practices environmentally responsible forestry.


Path to Henry Hudson
Photos by Arthur Nobre
Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild
Woodstock, New York

The piece is part of an outdoor exhibition of memorials to Henry Hudson by architects from the Catskill and Hudson Valley area hosted by Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and curated by Linda Winetraub. Opening on Saturday, until October 12.