cynthia hawkins: not all travellers walk roads – of humanity as practice

Entitled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, this edition of the Bienal de São Paulo will be led by chief curator Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung together with his conceptual team of co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz and Thiago de Paula Souza, as well as co-curator at large Keyna Eleison and strategy and communication advisor Henriette Gallus. The exhibition takes its cue from Afrobrazilian poet Conceição Evaristo’s poem Da calma e do silêncio (Of calm and silence).

The exhibition is also accompanied by a historic change in the organization of the event, which is traditionally held from September to December. The Fundação Bienal is pleased to announce that the 36th Bienal will be extended by an additional four weeks, being presented free of charge to the public from September 6, 2025, to January 11, 2026. The decision was made by President Andrea Pinheiro and her Board of Directors to further expand the reach of the exhibition, allowing a larger number of visitors to enjoy it during the school holiday period.

The central proposal of this Bienal is to rethink humanity as a verb, a living practice, in a world that requires reimagining relationships, asymmetries and listening as the basis for coexistence, based on three curatorial fragments/axes. The metaphor of the estuary – a place where different water currents meet and create a space for coexistence – guides the curatorial project, inspired by Brazilian philosophies, landscapes and mythologies. This concept reflects the multiplicity of encounters that have marked Brazil’s history and proposes that humanity comes together and transforms itself through an attentive ear and negotiation between different beings and worlds.

According to chief curator Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung:

“In a time when humans seem to have, again, lost grip on what it means to be human, in a time when humanity seems to be losing the ground under its feet, in a time of aggravated sociopolitical, economic, environmental crisis across the globe, it seems to us urgent to invite artists, scholars, activists, and other cultural practitioners anchored within a wide range of disciplines to join us in rethinking what humanity could mean and conjugating humanity. Despite or because of all these past-present-future crises and urgencies, we must afford ourselves the privilege of imagining another world through another concept and practice of humanity. So Not All Travelers Walk Roads — Of Humanity as Practice is an invitation to think and manifest humanity as a verb and a practice, to think about humanity as encounter(s) and negotiations upon the meeting of varying worlds. It is an invitation to deliberate on the dismantling of asymmetries as a prerequisite for humanity as a practice, just as this Bienal gives us to center joy, beauty and their poeticalities as the gravitational forces that keep our worlds on their axes… for joy and beauty are political. This is an invitation to imagine a world in which we place an accent on our humanities in a moment when humanity is literally failing us.”

Regarding the 36th edition, Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, reflects:

“The Bienal de São Paulo is a Brazilian cultural legacy, and this edition is the result of a collective process that began with our advisory board, responsible for deliberating and selecting the curatorial project most aligned with contemporary challenges. This year, we were thrilled to receive the project Not All Travelers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, proposed by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. This project not only reaffirms the Bienal’s role as a space for reflection and dialogue on the most pressing issues of our time, but also demonstrates the institutional commitment of the Fundação to promoting artistic practices in a way that is accessible and relevant to diverse audiences. And it is precisely with the aim of reaching as many people as possible that we have extended the duration of the exhibition by four weeks, until January 2026, so that more visitors have the opportunity to engage with the incredible artistic production that the curatorial team is gathering.”