Not All Travellers Walk Roads - Of Humanity as Practice

Curatorial text

Institutional text

With each edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, the year following the exhibition held in São Paulo is marked by a program of traveling exhibitions presented in cities across different regions of Brazil and abroad. Selections from the major exhibition hosted at the Bienal Pavilion are made possible through partnerships with museums and cultural institutions. These traveling exhibitions expand the reach of the event, contributing to its national and international visibility by creating new opportunities for dialogue and engagement with increasingly diverse audiences.

This is the third time the program has landed in Curitiba, at the Museu Oscar Niemeyer (MON), an institution that has established itself as one of the country’s most important cultural centers. Through this partnership, the Bienal reaffirms its cultural and educational mission, built over more than seventy years of history, and joins forces with the MON itself, whose emblematic Brazilian modernist architecture establishes a direct dialogue with the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, home of the Fundação Bienal, bringing together historical and contemporary dimensions in the arts through the work of Oscar Niemeyer.

The traveling exhibition of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice features works that invite the public to rethink humanity as a verb, through concrete and living actions, as well as a call for deep listening by creating spaces that acknowledge multiple forms of coexistence and the interdependence of all beings. By fostering encounters with these works, the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo seeks to contribute to the construction of a more diverse and plural society, encouraging and democratizing access to contemporary art and to the debates that invariably accompany it.

Andrea Pinheiro
President – Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

Diante das assimetrias que conferem o tom das relações entre os grupos humanos, vale a pena adotar uma postura em que perguntas sejam permanentemente colocadas, no sentido de inquirir as diferentes formas de manifestação da violência e da injustiça – evitando, com isso, tomá-las como dadas. A arte, com sua vocação para indagar e reimaginar o mundo, oferece recursos que permitem delinear, se não respostas, ao menos encaminhamentos críticos e inventivos para as questões formuladas. Eis um campo favorável à elaboração de problemas que cruzam o tempo e o espaço, afetando as pessoas e coletividades de maneira estruturalmente desigual.

coreografias do impossível, mote curatorial da 35ª edição da Bienal de São Paulo, articula experimentos artísticos dispostos a torcer as temporalidades e espacialidades representativas de seus contextos de origem e/ou migração, de modo a desnaturalizar lugares comuns do pensamento, suspender pretensas neutralidades e interpelar estruturas históricas. Ensaios ficcionais e criações poéticas permitem olhares desconfiados às convenções da realidade. Eles facultam imaginários até então impensados, colocando em xeque determinadas compreensões universalizantes da existência, ao mesmo tempo em que abrem caminho para narrativas que concebem as vidas em termos alternativos, portanto, não hegemônicos.

É de acordo com esse enfoque que o Sesc e a Fundação Bienal reiteram sua parceria, mutuamente comprometida com o fomento de vivências significativas a partir da fruição das artes visuais contemporâneas. Amplia-se, por meio dessa aproximação, tanto o acesso às propostas artísticas como, por conseguinte, oportunidades de exercício da alteridade. Dando sequência a uma iniciativa de mais de uma década, o presente recorte da exposição possibilita que módulos itinerantes circulem por unidades do Sesc no interior paulista. Ao concretizar o princípio da cultura como direito, a instituição faz da mostra mais emblemática da América Latina um ensejo de conexão com realidades locais que tendem a se beneficiar da defrontação com interrogações desafiadoras.

Luiz Deoclécio Massaro Galina
diretor – Sesc São Paulo

The 36th Bienal de São Paulo opens as an encounter: worlds, stories, and rhythms converge into a polyphony. A space that rises from these multiple voices which, in displacement, do not seek to be accounts of migrations or cries of identity and their politics, but rather to reflect on the notion of humanity in an era of mass dehumanization. Like an estuary where fresh and salt waters meet, the exhibition becomes a place of negotiation, of nourishment, struggle, and possibly repair. Their confluence creates fertile grounds in which practices of humanity can take on new meanings.

Which paths do we take to practice humanity? How do we allow ourselves to go off track, to embrace errancy, to get lost and to find other worlds and ourselves anew?

Echoing Afro-Brazilian poet Conceição Evaristo’s evocation of “submerged worlds that only the silence of poetry penetrates,” this exhibition emerges as a threshold, passage and dwelling, by metaphorically suggesting paths and contexts humankind, as travellers, might follow or inhabit.

Humanity is a practice.

Humanity is a verb.

It can be conjugated.

Etymologically related to the word “humus,” – “soil,” – the “human” evoked here in no way coincides with the one who takes the land as a material good to be enclosed and treated as property. Rather, it refers to one for whom the land is synonymous with belonging, the sustaining ground of an existence that is always communal. It does not matter where that human is, and therefore is not restricted to origin or destination. A collective practice that, moreover, constitutes resistance to colonial legacies and to the exploitation of all forms of life—human and more-than-human bodies—, since the organic and the inorganic are part of an interconnected whole and, therefore, interdependent. A whole, and all those within it, that require mutual care.

A practice that, beyond being read or seen, calls for deep and attentive listening, resonating with sovereignty, emancipation, and the dignity of persistence. A musical motif, a composition in motion that shifts in different directions, opposed to predatory notions of progress. An affirmation of the strength of vulnerability, of ancestral cosmogonies, of visions of the future, and of a careful attention to everyday gestures.

In this sense, this Bienal is a living score, through which the paths between the works—and each work as an open path in itself—are filled with the sharing of different ways of navigating landscapes, through working, resting, celebrating, and ritualizing. It is an invitation for the body to move, open to solidarity, to togetherness, to the recognition of coexistence and of beauty as a political and poetic practice.

The Conceptual Team of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo

The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament) (2025), by Emeka Ogboh (1977. Lives in Berlin, Germany) meditates on the profound and often violent entanglement between human progress and ecological collapse. Rooted in the lens of deforestation, the installation weaves together the emotive force of folk rhapsody, contemporary data-driven compositional structures, and a multisensory environment to create an immersive experience that reflects on the interdependence between the human and the environment. The installation draws from environmental research, oral histories, and traditional songs of grief and reverence for nature. These elements are recomposed into a contemporary choral work that gives voice to the Earth’s suffering, and to the fragility of the ecosystems we continue to erode. The lyrics of the work are structured in the tradition of the folk lament – simple, direct, and emotionally resonant. The verses recount the Earth’s pain in vivid language, while the chorus anchors the emotional landscape in collective grief. Folk songs, long vessels of cultural memory, hold within them the ancestral knowledge and lived wisdom of communities that have cultivated coexistence with the land.

Delta-Delta: People’s Court I (2025) by the research agency Forensic Architecture / Forensis (founded in 2010, London, United Kingdom) offers a form of transgenerational testimony that is immersive and emergent, evidentiary and generative, entering through the 1897 sacking of the “Forest Kingdom” of Benin by the British. Through live and pre-recorded depositions, witnesses take the stand within evolving digital reconstructions of transatlantic ecologies that have been uprooted and eroded along the “continuum of extractivism.” The work is a multi-year investigation into the transatlantic petro-extractivist complex, which occupies lands and communities across the “Transatlantic Forest Belt” – a speculative term for a once-contiguous Pangaean forest, long ago divided into an “ecological diaspora” by plate tectonics. The remains of this tricontinental forest span from the ancient sacred groves of the Niger Delta to the burial groves of Louisiana’s historically enslaved people. Delta-Delta: People’s Court I was sparked by a conversation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, inspired by a song of the same title by Mutabaruka, and conceptualised by Tobechukwu Onwukeme and Imani Jacqueline Brown. Partners include Uyilawa Usuanlele, Institute for Benin Studies, Home of Mother Earth Foundation, Museum of West African Art (Nigeria), Rise St. James, and Descendants Project (United States).

Gervane de Paula (1961. Lives in Cuiabá, Brazil) creates his artwork with a strong graphic character across multiple platforms, such as paintings, drawings, photography, installations, and objects. His work carries a potent ecological appeal, alternating between melancholic tones and a powerful denunciatory charge. The artist draws from and operates within an aesthetic shaped by images of mass consumption and the use of everyday materials from the Brazilian Midwest, alongside assertive references to art history. Seeing his works as political and environmental denunciations that would prevent them from continuing their illicit activities, these figures retaliate with brutal force, using the privileges of their power. Beyond environmental crimes, such as large-scale deforestation, pollution, and the extinction of numerous species of fauna and flora, De Paula also addresses the social crime caused by the dynamics of agribusiness, drug trafficking on the border between Mato Grosso and Bolivia, structural racism, police authoritarianism, and political corruption.

In her sculptures, Nádia Taquary (1967. Lives in Salvador, Brazil) evokes feminine power through bronze casting. By transmuting the metal and shaping it, the artist imbues it with a technical refinement reminiscent of sumptuous ancient African production. Her work re-signifies African traditions, bringing to light technologies, narratives, and aesthetics that have historically been ignored or appropriated by the West. Based on her studies of Afro-Brazilian jewelry, Taquary delves into ancestral, religious, and Afro-feminine history. Jewelleries such as balangandans, which adorned the waists of Black women during the enslaved-owning period, are symbols of strength and power. By expanding them into three-dimensional form, the artist deconstructs narratives imposed by colonialism and the history of art itself. Here only presented in parts, the installation Ìrókó: A árvore cósmica [Ìrókó: The Cosmic Tree] (2025), presented at the Bienal Pavilion in São Paulo, the bronze sculptures represent the Ìyámis entities and evoke knowledge through the cycle of life.

Olu Oguibe is a interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work explores identity, migration, and social justice. For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Oguibe presented a monument in three Brazilian cities – São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belém – which aims to spotlight ongoing injustices against Indigenous communities in Brazil and worldwide. The monument’s presence is intended to serve as a highly visible acknowledgment of Indigenous struggles, notably addressing the persistent encroachment on Indigenous lands due to agricultural, logging, and mining interests, alongside the violent repression Indigenous activists frequently endure. Each large billboard, on a building gable, prominently features a question, “MUST YOU TAKE EVERYTHING THAT BELONGS TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE?,” in Nheengatu, Portuguese, and English. Through this multilingual display, Oguibe emphasizes the international resonance and urgency of Indigenous rights. The project integrates activism with dialogue to document and disseminate ongoing Indigenous struggles, fostering broader awareness and solidarity. The mural monument exemplifies Oguibe’s consistent commitment to art as a vehicle for social reflection, change, and empowerment, highlighting the artist’s enduring dedication to confronting pressing global concerns through transformative artistic expression.

Documenting the violence of apartheid in South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, Ernest Cole’s work (Eersterust, South Africa, 1940 – New York, United States, 1990) reminds us of how closely intertwined military and photographic technologies are. In both actions—shooting a person and taking a photograph—one can observe similarities in the engineering of impact, whether triggering an explosive or activating a camera’s shutter. It was this system of political and visual segregation that forced Cole into exile in the United States in 1966, carrying with him his photographic negatives. Permanently banned from his homeland, Cole settled in New York, where he organized his writings and photographic accounts in the first person. It was there that he published one of the first works to expose the injustices of apartheid to the world: House of Bondage (1967), originally created as a photobook. However, as Cole’s photography began circulating in exhibitions, his photographic testimony reached a new audience. Instead of touching the book, now the viewer’s body must move closer to the photographs hanging on the wall, transferring the sensitivity from the hands to the eyes, keenly attuned to the exhibition space. Also, the linear narrative of chapters is replaced by a carefully curated selection and organization of key moments captured by the photographer.

The installation Te Ara Uwha – mai i Kurawaka [The Path of the Sacred Feminine – From Kurawaka], by Raukura Turei (1987. Lives in Auckland, Aotearoa) consists of four female Māori deities represented across several whenua paintings. Drawing from Te Ao Māori – the Māori world and worldview – Turei invokes the significance, mana (prestige), and power of the female deity to bring her works into being. Central to this cosmology is the separation of Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother and paramount matriarchal deity, from her lover Ranginui, the celestial, patriarchal deity. From this separation emerged Te Ao Mārama, the world of light – a creation story shared across many Oceanic cultures as the beginning of human existence. Kurawaka, Papatūānuku’s pubic region and the place where the first woman was created, is a sacred red earth known as kōkōwai. These works embody Papatūānuku/ Kurawaka; Hineahuone, the first woman formed from the red earth of Kurawaka; Hinetītama, daughter of Hineahuone, who later transitions into Hine-nui-te-pō, the deity of death and guardian of the underworld. When viewed or imagined from above, the installation reveals the Pouhine design – a weaving pattern representing the inversion of the Poutama, a traditionally masculine form. Pouhine is a vessel-like structure honoring the whare tangata, the womb. This structure maps the lineage from light into darkness, from the realm of the living to the spiritual domain, where Hine-nui-te-pō receives her children and guides them to Hawaiki, the ancestral and spiritual homeland of the Māori and related Oceanic nations that share this whakapapa [genealogy].

Sertão Negro (founded in 2021, Goiânia, Brazil) is both an aesthetic and political proposition, an initiative that challenges boundaries – between art and life, community and autonomy, collective organization, belonging, and displacement. Founded by Ceiça Ferreira and Dalton Paula, the project is a space for creation that respects individuality within a joint action, where art is not confined to the production of objects but unfolds into a way of inhabiting the world. Based in Goiânia, Goiás, Sertão Negro hosts a studio, residencies for national and international artists, a film club, a capoeira group, an active kitchen, gardens, and nurseries. These are not mere metaphors of resistance but concrete tools in the search for sovereignty and self-determination, evoking quilombola and Indigenous resistance practices – both past and present. There, cultivation and creation intertwine, making the notions of care and continuity more than words: what is planted in the Sertão is a way of doing and thinking that transcends beyond its walls. Formed by around thirty people – including resident artists, researchers, cooks, educators, curators, and mem- bers of Sertão Verde, a group focused on agroecology and food sovereignty – the collective promotes debates and exchanges of experiences in an alternative model of exchange, where processes are as important as the artistic production itself. The foundation of the project is rooted in quilombos and terreiros – spaces of resistance and knowledge – as well as in ancestral construction techniques and the wisdom of the land.

Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos’s (1995. Lives in São Paulo, Brazil) practice develops through long-term research-based projects. In the installation A casa de Bené [Bené’s House] (2025), the artist turns the research inward, into herself and her nuclear family. Starting from a set of objects left over from the demolished wattle-and-daub house built by her great-grandfather Benedito Cândido, Raylander builds an installation that seeks to recognize his creative influence on her political and poetic construction. The work explores familial structures as enduring institutions, looming large in both memory and form. The sets of metal baskets refer to the local context: the small town of Bela Vista de Minas (Minas Gerais), where the presence of mining is a daily occurrence and contrasts with vernacular and traditional practices, such as basketry. The totality of these elements intertwines to weave narratives vof family history, place, nation, and belonging

Adjani Okpu-Egbe (1979. Lives in London, United Kingdom) infuses his personal experience into expressive, harmonious colors, an inventive symbolism, and expansive use of materials. Known for his layered visual language and abstracted figures he refers to as “manimals,” Okpu-Egbe’s cross-demographic shaping of cultural thought is far-reaching. With a style described as “shelving” by the Bienal’s chief curator, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, these motifs expand the artist’s technique and incorporate sculptural objects embedded with stories. They complement the door panels – playing with the idea of “open” and “closed” doors in our daily lives – as a potent metaphor for what we shelve, share, or discard. The piece Fortitude (2018-2024) advocates against erasure by shelving books authored by Black women. Premonition of Ngarbuh (2020-2024), produced in response to the 2020 Ngarbuh massacre in Cameroon, confronts the horrors of state-sanctioned violence, in which women and children bear the brunt while the “international community” remains silent. Displayed alongside is An Allegorical Conglomeration of Origins and Inevitabilities (2024), rooted in envisioning Black futures.

In Long Long Long Ago (2025), Helena Uambembe (b. 1994) imagines the catastrophic disruption of a long-forgotten time of equilibrium, harmony, and the occult. This is the split of two parallel entities, two equals and opposites – nemeses – in this instance twin giant brothers locked in constant battle despite their similarities. Their violent rivalry, which splits the earth, overshadows those who suffer the most from this fracture – the small creatures who live amongst them, their toil almost invisible. Their warnings of the trouble caused by the giants go unheard and ignored. Uambembe’s work turns towards the medium of video, where shadow and light interplay with the artist’s own transfixing narration. Her father was among the Angolan men in Namibian refugee camps conscripted into South Africa’s apartheid-era 32 Battalion; her mother was one of the women forced to marry and start a family within weeks. After the Cold War, the battalion was transferred to Pomfret, South Africa, where residents were later made to mine asbestos and left in a decaying town marked by political shame and collapse. That community – Portuguese-speaking, isolated, and stigmatized – has shaped Uambembe’s practice through a complex inheritance of forced migration and generational trauma.

Leiko Ikemura’s (Lives in Cologne and Berlin, Germany) work reflects the singular trajectory of a universal artist who, born in Mie province, Japan, and Based in Europe since the 1970, has developed a poetic language shaped by the experience of displacement and a constant dialogue between cultures. This transnational experience allows her to escape both a rigidly Japanese identity and an automatic adherence to the canons of Western art. Her work outlines a field of its own, where echoes of Spanish Baroque painting and European Neo-Expressionism – such as the Junge Wilde movement – intertwine with foundations of Japanese aesthetic thought, including respect for matter and nature, an appreciation of gesture, and the acceptance of imperfection. In the Red Scape and Sea Division drawing series, line and color act as records of a sensitive gesture that brings writing closer to landscape - an inheritance visible in both Japanese calligraphy and the practice of sumi-e. With rarefied lines and vibrant atmospheres, these images condense the tension between presence and disappearance. In Ikemura’s work, the elements of tradition are not formal quotations, but living forces that traverse an artistic practice in constant metamorphosis.

In 1972, still in the midst of the Cold War, the island of Okinawa was reincorporated into Japan after 25 years of US military occupation. Although the administration was officially transferred to the Japanese government, bilateral security agreements allowed the military bases to remain, consolidating Okinawa as one of the main US strategic posts in the Pacific region. It is in this context that the photo book Hot Days in Camp Hansen!! (1975-1977) was born, which was reissued in 2017 under the title Red Flower, The Women of Okinawa. The images produced by Ishikawa feature two social groups deeply rooted in the Okinawan daily life of the 1970s: US soldiers, mostly Black, and the women from the town of Kin, who worked in the bars around Camp Hansen and often had affective and sexual relationships with these men. Ishikawa reveals a complex network of affection and solidarity between individuals who share common feelings and a common life. Mao Ishikawa (1953. Lives in Tomigusuku, Japan) went beyond the island’s borders and traveled to Philadelphia, where she spent about two months living with her friend Myron Carr, a former soldier. She portrays the context of origin of the men with whom she shared a daily life in Okinawa. Far from the militarized environment, her photos capture scenes of friends and family meeting, children playing, relaxed conversations on the sofa, and walks through the city’s streets.

Time does not behave according to measure in Ruth Ige’s (1992. Lives in Auckland, Aotearoa) work. It suspends, folds, and accumulates. Her figures, cloaked and faceless, do not offer themselves up for recognition. They remain withheld, mythic, softly monumental. What emerges is not portraiture, but presence – a form of being that holds its own power. Ige deepens this vision through her use of culturally resonant materials: baobab powder, indigo, Nigerian dried leaves, Brazilian clays, blue spirulina. These are not aesthetic embellishments but agents of memory and knowledge – bridging Yoruba and Igbo cultural practices with diasporic life in Brazil, Aotearoa, and various parts of the world. Her canvases act as anthropological estuaries, holding ecological, spiritual, and ancestral inheritances within the very pigment. The paintings take on a slow, sedimentary quality – as if formed over time rather than made at once. Her engagement with the art historical canon is not about refusal, but reconfiguration. Portraiture, if it remains at all, is reshaped through abstraction and imaginative speculation – offering other ways of knowing and remembering. Formally, the works extend beyond the stretcher. Each spatial decision plays with painting as a site of world-making, echoing textile forms, immaterial transmissions, and imagined futures.

Julianknxx’s (1987. Lives in London, United Kingdom) work traverses geographies, languages, and gestures, building an archive in transit. To think of his work is to think directly of the cultural roots of West Africa, especially Sierra Leone, where the artist comes from. In his films, installations, and performances, the artist does not seek out a single testimony, but a fabric of memories and presences that escapes colonial narratives. The choir, the spoken word, the performance that becomes matter – the artist understands music as resistance, but also as a trace of something greater: the sound of those who have never stopped moving. His work is part of the oral tradition of a living Africa and leads us to the following question: What does it mean to belong to a place when places are always intersected by other stories? Writing poems is a fundamental part of his creative process, a tool that not only underpins his work, but the way he articulates his experiences and observes the realities of the world. His practice challenges the hierarchies of the Western archive, transforming listening through a radical method and fragmentation in terms of form. His images and sounds remind us that our stories were never just the colonial narratives we were told – they are also what we keep singing, even when no one seems to be listening.

Ming Smith’s (Lives in New York, United States) long career of street photography makes her one of the most special examples of why the act of picking up a camera in search of capturing the things of the world, the sounds of the world, is accompanied by a feeling of immeasurability and, in this sense, also of justice. Ming’s relationship with music is manifold. This is evident in the images in which the photographer shows us her proximity to the US music scene, including trips to Berlin and Cairo. But as well as being thematic, music also drives the poetic process itself and materializes in the dim light of a number of the images, as well as in their blurriness, in the syncopation present in the clarity of the scene or lack of it in photographs such as those that portrait the jazz scene. Also in the effects caused by the shaking and movement of the photographer in her urban observation, which ultimately make photography and music present as manifestations of transparency and invisibility.Ming Smith’s African-American and Black-diasporic experience is expressed by the rhythm, the beat, and the vibrations of the camera on stage, in worship, at a concert, or in everyday life on the street.

Moka BOB Sound System (2025) is a sound-based research project by Alain Padeau (1956. Lives in Le Tampon, Réunion, France) that culminates in a sculptural musical instrument. It is crafted through the combination of bows, metal strings, and spherical acoustic chambers. The geometric architecture of the truncated icosahedron enables the artist to work with the scale of the acoustic chamber, transforming a handcrafted object into a work of art whose configuration and activation evoke other kindred instruments, with the mvett—found among the Fang, Béti, and Bulu peoples, Bantu-language cultural groups distributed across Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Cameroon—standing as one of its key predecessors. From this system derives the berimbau, developed in Brazil by enslaved Africans and their descendants, and the bobre, used on Réunion Island. Thus, the bobre is part of a complex diasporic apparatus which, like capoeira, was designed to offer protection and ease the suffering of bodies exploited by enslaved labor. In this work, Alain Padeau revisits the therapeutic effects of the bobre, drawing not only on its ancestral morphology, tracing back to the African mvett, but also on an immersive exploration of the melodic and hypnotic resonance of the single-string instrument.

Maria Auxiliadora (Campo Belo, Brazil, 1935 – São Paulo, Brazil, 1974) was the fourth daughter in a family of farmers, composed of eighteen siblings, originally from Campo Belo (Minas Gerais), who moved to São Paulo when she was three years old. Auxiliadora began working at a very young age, which prevented her from continuing her studies. She worked as a nanny, maid, cook, and also as an embroiderer until she was able to dedicate herself exclusively to painting. She met critics and collectors, which allowed her work to gain exposure, though it was almost always categorized as “primitive” or “naïve” – a simplistic and elitist fixation that failed to acknowledge the formal qualities of her work. Among her innovations was the use of a gesso preparation that she applied to her paintings, which gave her work a three-dimensional quality. Her technique highlights meticulous details, particularly in the faces, hands, and clothing of her subjects, imparting a sense of intimacy and authenticity. Her vibrant color palette enhances the vitality of the figures, while her compositions emphasize the details that humanize and elevate each person portrayed. Her work, dominated by a semantic focus on intimacy, is nourished by a visual repertoire that celebrates the creation of beauty and closeness through everyday, familial, intimate, religious, labor, festive, and joyful scenes from her community.