Conceptual team 36th São Paulo Biennial
Conceptual team of the 36th São Paulo Biennial. Footer: João Medeiros

The contours of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, which opens its doors to the public on September 6th. Amidst an intense assembly process, a collaborative project is taking shape, built from intense dialogue between the members of the curatorial team. Last week, co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Keyna Eleison, and Thiago de Paula Souza spoke with Arte!Brasileiros about the general lines of this work, its main challenges, methodologies and discoveries. 

Among the various metaphors that served as a guide during this journey, one that compares the team to migratory birds stands out, moving with an expanded understanding of time and space, only to return to the group, exchanging and reframing suggestions and discoveries, and configuring—throughout these encounters—families of work, with shared thoughts and poetics. "Each of us took different routes, but we were very communicative birds," explained Alya Sebti. "Every artist on our list was chosen by each of the five of us; there's no artist we didn't meet and discuss their work with," added Keyna Eleison. According to Anna Roberta Goetz, their flight paths deliberately sought to avoid pre-established paths. Brazilians Keyna Eleison and Thiago de Paula Souza, for example, didn't "fly over" the country, which isn't to say they didn't suggest important national names derived from their previous research. "We tried to combine stories we already knew with new voices, always looking for connections," added the researcher, who lives in Switzerland (her native country) and Mexico. It took a lot of back and forth to reach the list of 120 artists, announced a few months ago. 

The curators caution that at no point was the intention to propose a panorama of contemporary production, but rather to trace horizontal and intergenerational narratives, creating clusters based on affinities of various types: formal, existential, thematic, or poetic. An example of a powerful group is one that brings together Black, working-class women who, self-taught, find in art a way to assert themselves in the world, like Maria Auxiliadora. Chaïbia Talal and Hessie. Another common thread that can be gleaned from the guest list is the overriding interest in memory, the search for new ways to tell forgotten or invisible stories. Or even an important revival of artists situated on the margins of hegemonic centers, who developed their poetics in tune with (and also in tension with) Eurocentric avant-garde models.

In the field of more contemporary production, the list is also surprising, especially due to the massive presence of commissioned works, made especially for the Biennial.  – more than 50% of the productions fall into this category. And also because they reflect (like the more historical selections) a much broader view of the world. From Tehran to Haiti, from Aleppo to Dakar, the exhibition spans regions much less explored internationally, with a close focus on African production. This is a result not only of the curatorial methodology adopted – such as the organization of "Invocations" across different continents – but also of the fact that two of the curators in charge are African: chief curator Bonaventure Soh Ndikung is from Cameroon, and Alya Sebti is from Morocco. 

While still preserving information regarding the works that will comprise the exhibition and the final contours of the complex expography, the curators reveal that the exhibition's design is guided by the idea of ​​the pavilion as an estuary (another powerful metaphor that guided the process) and articulates some changes in the traditional use of the space, such as the creation of vertical connections in a space so characterized by the linearity of horizontal floors. We will no longer have, for example, the void as an isolated space occupied by a single work. "It will always be Niemeyer's building; we're not fighting that," says Keyna. "It's as if we're dancing with the building," adds Alya. 

Music and dance, forms of expression that had been listed as fundamental to the curatorial project, are present both as language –  through creators like Leonel Vásquez and Cevdet Erek—as much as an allegory of this collective process. "Music is rhythm; we think of music as an element of inspiration," says Thiago de Paula Souza, recalling how fundamental it is to the work of Heitor dos Prazeres, another historic Brazilian in the selection who, in addition to winning an award at the first Bienal in 1951, had a deep connection—not just as a theme—with the world of samba. But they also coexist with a wealth of photography, video, and painting, in an exhibition where the diversity of media, techniques, and poetics seems fundamental.

The presence of dissonance, the coexistence of different voices, and the unavoidable presence of combative works (themes such as colonialism, oppression, human rights violations, and environmental debacle are prominent) doesn't mean, for Thiago, that we're facing a militant exhibition. "Most exhibitions showing how the world is burning have failed," he says. The fact that it doesn't resemble a manifesto doesn't mean, for Anna, that the 36th Biennale isn't political. "It's a very political exhibition. Not in the sense of commenting on or showing what's happening, but rather through the artists' experiences. There are many works that speak to concrete experiences, and there's an openness in this concreteness, an invitation for different people to look at themselves," she says. 


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