by Denise Gadelha — Artist, researcher e independent curator

As I write, the headlines pulse with a countdown to COP30, as Brazil begins to welcome its first guests. These stories move through me, shaping the air of this moment. Among the many possible frames from which to approach the 36th São Paulo Biennial, I was compelled to walk the paths that lead to questions of foreignness — and of our biomes.

The 36th São Paulo Biennial, Not All Travelers Walks Roads— Of Humanity as Practice, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, presents itself as a manifesto for encounter and listening. Rooted in the etymology of humanity — humus, the soil —it affirms that our persistence, and that of other species, depends on recognizing that union is not a choice but a condition of existence.

As the world’s second-oldest biennial, São Paulo’s is vast and porous, set within the city’s largest urban park and welcoming nearly a million visitors — most of them local, including more than a hundred thousand students. To curate here is to engage with a civic organism: collective, plural, and alive. Listening, in this context, also means acknowledging the work of the institutional teams — communication, design, education — who transform curatorial intent into shared experience.

Yet this is where the Biennial’s theme falters. Ndikung removed wall labels in the name of “direct experience,” assuming an ideal visitor confident enough to navigate alone. The opening days, however, were marked by confusion: maps ran out, QR codes failed, and neither map nor catalogue was yet online.

Geographer Milton Santos (1926–2001) described globalization as a tension between verticalities — global flows — and horizontalities — lived local experience. Ndikung’s Biennial leans toward the vertical: its preparatory Invocations were held in four countries, none of them Brazil, and their video records remain untranslated. No itinerant editions were announced, breaking a tradition that once extended the show’s reach across the country. If listening is a form of grounding, this Biennial seems, at times, to speak more to its global peers than to the local community that sustains it.

Public and press criticism had an effect: labels and maps returned, the website was updated, and by late October the Biennial introduced Iara, an AI guide accessible via QR code — a curious swing from absence to overmediation. It’s like tuning an old radio: too much one way, then too little, until the signal comes clear.

None of this, however, eclipsed the strength of the works themselves. They breathe — alive, urgent, rooted in the present.

At the entrance, Moisés Patrício’s Brasilidades makes no effort to conceal the threshold; it exposes it. Liturgical objects from Candomblé, cast in clay and partly engulfed by concrete, fossilize ancestral temporality within modernist materiality. Placed where park meets pavilion, the work renders the institutional boundary porous, confronting who defines “Brazilianness” — and what remains unseen within power structures.

Just inside the building, Precious Okoyomon’s Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me extends the Biennial’s fascination with soil while revealing its contradictions. Evoking the Cerrado — a biome where roots plunge deep to reach groundwater through long dry seasons — Okoyomon’s mist-fed garden, sealed under glass, rests on shallow soil under artificial light. Containing such life recalls the colonial genealogy of the greenhouse, built to domesticate and display the “exotic.” Deprived of depth, wind, and sun, the plants seem to strain under glass — a failure of bio-empathy, an inability to hear vegetal life beyond metaphor. By contrast, Denilson Baniwa’s Kwema/Amanhecer, from the previous Biennial, grew outdoors on the pavilion terrace — a maize field that embodied time, sustenance, and collective ritual: a horizontal practice that treated life not as object, but as collaborator.

Far more grounded — literally and metaphorically — Gê Viana responds to these tensions through collage, both visual and sonic. Her installation A Colheita de Dan vibrates with low bass frequencies, fusing reggae rhythms with ancestral drums and turning the pavilion floor into a resonant membrane. Reworking colonial iconography of Brazil as seen through foreign eyes, Viana performs “traumatic updates”: erasing caravels, re-shoeing the Black bodies once depicted barefoot, restoring dignity. Her radiola — a monumental sound-system altar — houses archival photographs from Maranhão’s Afro-diasporic musical culture: carnival, reggae gatherings, communal rituals. Each image is treated as a sacred icon within a collective amplifier, where sound becomes a vehicle of memory and repair.

The Cerrado resurfaces as a living collective through the atelier-school Sertão Negro, founded by Dalton Paula and Ceiça Ferreira in Goiás. Rooted in quilombo and terreiro traditions, the collective cultivates an ecosystem of ancestral practices where ceramics, printmaking, capoeira and agroecology intertwine with film, residencies and community exchange. At the Biennial, a semicircular wall of taipa de pilão encloses its space; behind it, a vitrine presents works created within the atelier-school, while a film program and ten activations unfolding throughout the exhibition period invite visitors into this embodied field of making. Here, perhaps, the Biennial’s call for “humanity as verb” finds one of its most vital expressions.

Also echoing the Cerrado, though in another register, collectivity takes form through the memory of matter itself. In Many Names, Sallisa Rosa summons an ancient knowledge to raise spiral structures built directly on the exhibition floor — as if shaped by the land’s first inhabitants. Her work asks whether matter can guide the gesture, and the answer seems to emerge from the branches and vines she weaves by hand. Each carries its own memory — curves inscribed by wind, light, and time — teaching her, through touch, how to braid them into a resilient structure. The process, stripped of tools or fixings, awakens a dormant mode of making — knowledge stored in both collective memory and material itself. All the wood was gathered in Ibirapuera Park, from fallen or pruned trees, so the act of building begins with an act of recognition: reading the territory around the exhibition.

If Rosa listens to the fallen branches of Ibirapuera, Rebeca Carapiá ventures into the forest itself. Encountering the paxiúba—or walking palm (Socratea exorrhiza)—at Inhotim, she later traveled to the Amazon to study its habitat and the motion of its aerial roots, which shift and renew as the shaded ones decay. In her copper and iron sculptures, these lessons unfold as sinuous lines that extend, retract, and weave through space like living maps of adaptation. Her Como criar raízes aéreas conjures a metallic family of palms that seems to breathe, a landscape both organic and forged — alive with the tension between resilience and transformation.

To honor the paxiúba is to celebrate the courage to abandon rotten roots and grow toward the sun. In this, Carapiá’s work becomes a quiet allegory for the Biennial itself — and perhaps for Brazil’s unfinished entanglement with the foreign. Even under the banner of decolonial discourse, old hierarchies persist, cloaked in new vocabularies. The challenge, as her walking palm reminds us, is not to disguise the root, but to let it move.