36th Bienal de Sao Paulo seeks to 'exhibit silence'

"The 36th Bienal de São Paulo is titled Not All Travellers Walk Roads-Of Humanity as Practice. It takes its name from a poem by the Afro-Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo titled Da calma e do silêncio ( Of Calm and Silence). The 1990 poem was published in the Cadernos Negros ( Black Notebooks) series, an ongoing publication founded in São Paulo in the late 1970s that promotes and preserves African diasporic literature in Brazil, a country where this kind of literature has been historically marginalised in mainstream publishing houses."

"The text of the poem "offers a language to speak of the unspeakable and teaches us that silence is not a void-it is a place of accumulation, of ancestry and of interior resistance", Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the chief curator of the 2025 Bienal de São Paulo, tells The Art Newspaper. "Evaristo's work invites us to listen to what is often excluded from dominant narratives. In the context of the Bienal, which is often perceived as hypervisible and hypermediated, her poetics push us to carve out moments of stillness and introspection." The curator says that he and his team asked themselves: "How do we exhibit silence?""

The 36th Bienal de São Paulo is titled Not All Travellers Walk Roads-Of Humanity as Practice and takes its name from Conceição Evaristo's poem Da calma e do silêncio. The 1990 poem appeared in the Cadernos Negros series, which promotes and preserves African diasporic literature in Brazil amid historical marginalisation. The poem frames silence as a site of accumulation, ancestry and interior resistance and calls attention to narratives excluded from dominant histories. Curators pose the question of how to exhibit silence and emphasize nonlinear, erased or ancestral journeys while framing humanity as a continuous, unfinished practice. The curatorial team includes five named collaborators and the biennial features 125 artists, 28 of whom are Brazilian.

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