36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025) – Reader

Ministry of Culture, Government of the State of São Paulo, through the Secretariat of Culture, Creative Economy and Industry, Municipal Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy of the City of São Paulo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and Itaú present

36 th Bienal de São Paulo

36 th Bienal de São Paulo

Since its creation in 1951, the Bienal de São Paulo has been marked by constant renewal. Each new chapter in its history proposes a way of existing in time and space, always in dialogue with the contemporary. The 36th edition of the event, under the title Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, is based on a curatorial concept developed by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Inspired by the poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence] by Conceição Evaristo, the chief curator propose an attentive listening to the multiple forms of humanity in displacements, encounters, and negotiations.

The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo believes that its mission is based on a central precept: relevance. This means producing meaning, generating access, and positively impacting as many people as possible. Being relevant means responding to the most pressing issues of our time while also embracing the doubts and uncertainties, in other words, asking questions. To this end, the curatorial selection, an assignment of each new board, is the first step. From there, the artists and their works unfold, chosen for their critical, aesthetic, and conceptual power, and for their ability to reflect or stress collective challenges. But no work is complete alone: the conditions for visitors to approach, interact, and find a space for exchange at the event must be created. This is done before, during, and after their visit, with educational materials, digital content, and new publications, which together broaden the experience and encourage a closer relationship with contemporary art, as well as research and audience building.

Being part of the development of a Bienal is a privilege. It’s watching art history unfold before your eyes – and seeing yourself in it. By following the birth of an exhibition of this scale, we become part of the living process of creation. From the conceptual decisions to the dismantling and the many waste treatment processes when the event is over, each stage requires precise coordination, constant dialogue, and shared responsibility between professionals from multiple fields.

This edition also has a special feature: its extended duration, from September 2025 to January 2026, prolonging its presence in the cultural calendar by one month. More than just an

extension of time, it’s a matter of enhancing the possibilities for encounters. And, as always, access is free, both to the exhibition and its programming – a commitment by the Fundação to the democratization of art and the ongoing construction of an increasingly participatory cultural public.

None of this would be possible without the joint commitment of our partners, especially the public bodies and sponsoring companies that believe in the relevance of art as a way of creating a better future for everyone. And, of course, it wouldn’t be possible without the Fundação Bienal’s professionals and the large network of collaborators who diligently ensure that demanding deadlines are met, that the planned actions are rigorously executed, that the institution’s financial health is maintained, and that this jewel of modernism, the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, the main stage for all these meetings, is well preserved. It is this commitment that guarantees the permanence of a historic project that has been going strong for more than seven decades – guided by the certainty of excellence and relevance.

Andrea Pinheiro President – Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

The Ministry of Culture celebrates the 36th Bienal de São Paulo –Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, an edition inspired by the verses of the renowned writer Conceição Evaristo. Through the Culture Incentive Law, known as the Rouanet Law, the Federal Government is proud to be one of the producers of this important event that brings together leading artists from all over the world to engage with fundamental issues of our times, amplified by an educational program that is internationally recognized.

The visual arts have the power to confront us with the most pressing themes of our time, employing complex poetic approaches that resist simplification or easy answers. More than offering solutions, the Bienal poses questions and multiplies perspectives, establishing contact with the diverse, with other life experiences, and with different ways of inhabiting the world. Visiting the Bienal offers a chance to broaden aesthetic and ethical repertoires through the exercise of empathy involved in engaging with works of art – an essential step toward strengthening a more citizen-oriented culture.

The Ministry of Culture has worked tirelessly to support the cultural sector, creating opportunities for artists and cultural workers across diverse languages and fields. Through initiatives such as the Rouanet Law, the Paulo Gustavo Law, and the National Aldir Blanc Policy for Cultural Support, this Ministry has been proud to promote projects throughout the country, strengthening the creative economy and working toward the implementation of permanent and democratic cultural policies.

The Bienal de São Paulo offers access to art free of charge, in a meaningful effort to democratize access to culture – an effort that aligns with the public policies advanced by this Ministry. Art and education are indispensable to ensuring the right to a full and critical citizenship, which belongs to all Brazilians. For this reason, the Federal Government, here represented by the Ministry of Culture, remains committed to investing in initiatives that promote full cultural engagement, so that present and future generations can access the transformative experience that art provides.

Margareth Menezes Minister of Culture – Federal Government of Brazil

For more than 35 years, Itaú Cultural (IC) has played a fundamental role in boosting the appreciation of art, culture, and education in a complex and heterogeneous society like Brazil. This role is expanded through essential partners for the development of the cultural and creative economy, such as the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

Itaú Unibanco is proud to be the strategic partner of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo – a partnership that spans the past 27 years, with this being the 12th edition held in that period – reaffirming its commitment to promoting the visual arts and their transformative role. The Bienal de São Paulo is an important meeting and exchange space for artists, curators, critics, and the public.

In this field, Itaú Cultural organizes actions for enjoyment, education, and promotion, including solo and group exhibitions that take place both at its headquarters on 149 Avenida Paulista (with free admission) and at venues in Brazil’s five regions. Highlights of the 2025 exhibitions include Carlos Zilio – A querela do Brasil, curated by Paulo Miyada, which will present a retrospective of this artist who, with erudition and irreverence, explored the tensions of Brazilian art. Exhibitions will also be dedicated to the visual artist Rivane Neuenschwander and the curator and critic Paulo Herkenhoff.

Visit itaucultural.org.br to browse the virtual exhibitions Filmes e vídeos de artistas, with experimental audiovisual works, and Livros de artista na Coleção Itaú Cultural, whose immersive and interactive features allow for detailed appreciation. At Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural (enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br) you can access hundreds of entries on figures, works, and events in the visual arts.

Being present at the Bienal de São Paulo reinforces our goal of building links with different audiences, valuing the diversity of formats, thoughts, and subjectivities, and fostering creative and critical thinking through Brazilian art and culture. Itaú Cultural

Bloomberg is proud to sponsor the 36th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo. For more than a decade we have supported the Bienal’s exceptional contemporary art exhibitions in the stunning Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park and around Brazil, through our partnership with Fundação Bienal. This year’s edition continues the tradition of presenting captivating and thoughtprovoking art installations that are free and open to the public.

Every day, Bloomberg connects influential decision-makers to a dynamic network of information, people, and ideas. With more than 19,000 employees in 176 offices, Bloomberg delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world. Our dedication to innovation and new ideas extends to our longstanding support of arts, which we believe are a valuable way to engage citizens and strengthen communities. Through our funding, we help increase access to culture and empower artists and cultural organizations to reach broader audiences.

For Bradesco, a Brazilian bank par excellence that has just celebrated its 83rd anniversary, art and culture are not only fundamental elements in the formation of a people’s identity or the construction of their intangible heritage, but also a journey of inclusion and citizenship, a healthy convergence of different points of view. It is, so to speak, a journey toward the new, but with the care to value what is special enough to be history or tradition.

Therefore, when it comes to art and culture, the boundaries between past, present, and future, between form and content, become meaningless. Everything becomes reflection and learning, everything becomes provocation and surprise.

It was on the basis of this interpretation, combined with the positive view of the role of companies in making possible what society considers important, that Bradesco became a sponsor of the 36th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, undoubtedly one of the most important events in the country aimed at promoting the arts scene, publicizing the various expressions of art, and promoting cultural exchange, with all the good that this brings.

By participating in something that is both great and multifaceted, Bradesco shares with the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo – which has organized the event for more than six decades – the goal of democratizing access to culture, multiplying its reach and promoting the appreciation of art.

It’s a path with no end, no turning back, full of challenges and at least one certainty: the more people who take part, the better!

Bradesco

Petrobras has a history of more than forty years of continuously believing in culture as a transformational element and a source of energy for society. By supporting unique projects and long-term partnerships, we have built a relationship of respect and collaboration with producers and initiatives all over the country.

The Petrobras Cultural Program has Brazilianness as its guiding element, which is materialized in the themes, origins, curatorship, history, and characteristics of each project we select. By supporting different projects, we put into practice our belief that culture is an important energy that transforms society. We believe that through creativity and inspiration we promote growth and change.

The Bienal de São Paulo is one of the sector’s most prestigious events in the country and the world. Petrobras’s sponsorship reinforces the company’s role in promoting culture in its various forms, consolidating its position as one of the biggest supporters of the arts in Brazil.

Events such as the Bienal de São Paulo make a significant contribution to the economy, promoting innovation, creativity, and sustainability in the economic dynamic. Petrobras is an ally of Brazil’s development in its various sectors. It invests in many forms of energy, and culture is certainly one of them.

Petrobras is proud to support Brazilian culture in its plurality of manifestations, taking art to all audiences, all over the country. Because culture is also our energy.

To find out more about the Petrobras Cultural Program, visit petrobras.com.br/cultura.

Instituto Cultural Vale believes in the transformative power of culture. As one of the main supporters of culture in Brazil, it sponsors and promotes projects that foster connections between people, initiatives, and territories. Its commitment is to make culture increasingly accessible and diverse, while also contributing to the strengthening of the creative economy.

It is therefore a pleasure to be part of the realization of this 36th Bienal de São Paulo and its educational program, which explores new formats and approaches. Developed from the Invocations proposed by the curatorial team – encounters with poetry, music, performances, and debates that explore notions of humanity across different geographies – the educational program expands the Bienal’s communication with diverse audiences and extends its reach beyond the exhibition space and timeframe, in an interdisciplinary way.

With each new edition, the Bienal invites us to rethink art as an exercise in dialogue, in openness to new narratives, and as a space for learning. In this sense, it aligns with the purpose of the Instituto Cultural Vale: to expand opportunities for learning, reflection, new perspectives, and the sharing of art, culture, and education – both inside and outside museums, throughout Brazil.

Where there is culture, Vale is there.

For 110 years, Citi has been part of Brazil’s history, accompanying its transformations and driving its development. Our journey is intertwined with that of the country: we are both witnesses to and participants in a Brazil that constantly reinvents itself and moves forward.

More than a financial institution, we believe in the power of culture and education as engines for a more inclusive, innovative, and sustainable future. Investing in these pillars also means celebrating the diversity, creativity, and talent that define the Brazilian spirit.

With this commitment, we are proud, for the first time, to support the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – one of the most important spaces for artistic expression in Latin America, where Brazil thinks, feels, and reinvents itself through art.

We believe in art as an agent of social transformation. Artistic creation has the power to spark dialogue, expand horizons, and inspire new possibilities for the world. By sponsoring the Bienal, we reaffirm our commitment to culture, innovation, and all those who, through art, are building new narratives for both the present and the future.

Vivo believes in culture as a means of social transformation and is one of the most important brands supporting the visual and performing arts and music in Brazil. Art, like technology, creates connections between people and encourages the search for balance between history, nature, and time.

Vivo is currently a sponsor of the most important museums in Brazil, such as the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS-SP), the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo, the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), as well as the Instituto Inhotim and the Palácio das Artes, both in Minas Gerais, and the Museu Oscar Niemeyer, in Paraná.

Teatro Vivo, located in São Paulo, offers a curated selection of contemporary plays that promote reflection on current issues and value cultural diversity. In addition, it is a fully accessible space, offering resources such as translation into Libras (Brazilian sign language), audio descriptions, and trained staff, ensuring inclusion for people with disabilities and reduced mobility. In 2024, it welcomed over 50,000 people.

The brand also supports projects in the world of music that are genuinely Brazilian and regional, reinforcing its proximity with local culture at iconic and traditional events in our country, such as the Parintins Festival, Galo da Madrugada, the Çairé Festival, Lollapalooza, The Town, and Vivo Música.

The brand’s initiatives in the cultural sphere broaden access to knowledge with new ways of experiencing and learning, strengthened by the aspects of diversity, sustainability, inclusion, and education. All information is gathered and shared on the @vivo.cultura and @vivo Instagram profiles.

Vivo

Confronted with the incessant problems of humanity, perhaps it is worth dwelling a little longer on some open questions, taking sustenance from resources that allow us to dig and build answers procedurally. In this sense, art, in its many guises, offers fertile ground for critical elaborations about the world and ourselves.

The meeting of art and education – both understood as fields of knowledge – enables the torsion of time and space: it becomes possible, thus, to suspend neutralities and dilate what is precipitated in structures. How far is this approach able to infer the real and interfere in it? It allows us to (re)populate imaginaries, to unpick the universalizing statute attributed to concepts, practices, and people, and thus to carve out reality with narratives that articulate the individual and the collective, in a procedural and coherent manner regarding the issues that permeate existence.

It is according to this panorama that Sesc São Paulo and the Fundação Bienal, through the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, reiterate their long-standing partnership, a mutual commitment to fostering experiences of coexistence with the visual arts, expanding access to cultural actions and the exercise of otherness.

This partnership, which has been established and renewed for over a decade, has led to the promotion of projects such as simultaneous exhibitions, public meetings, seminars, and training for educators, as well as the consolidated itinerant exhibition with excerpts from the Bienal in Sesc units in the wider state of São Paulo. The confluence of choices and propositions is part of the institutional perspective of culture as a right, and conceives, together with one of the largest exhibitions in the country, an accessible horizon for contemporary art in Brazil.

Sesc São Paulo

Of Calm and Silence

Conceição Evaristo

Not All Travellers Walk Roads Of Humanity as Practive A Concept in Three Fragments

Bonaventure Soh

Bejeng Ndikung

Entrance

Tsitsi Jaji

Spreading Clouds

Etel Adnan

I Declare

Abdellatif Laâbi

Alya Sebti

In the Indigenous Circular Time

Márcia Wayna Kambeba

Tout moun se moun

Jean Casimir

Of Humanity as Praxis Encounters in Three Fragments

Abena P. A. Busia

The et and the Human

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil

Us / Them Rodney Saint-Éloi

Walking Together Notes on Solidarity Beyond Empathy

Anna Roberta Goetz

It is We Who Are the Function

Joshua Chambers-Letson

Radical Deviations

Errancy as an Abolitionist

Practice

Juliana Borges

If Humanity Is a Verb, Then It Is to Walk

Jacques Attali with Alya Sebti and Bonaventure Soh

Bejeng Ndikung

Vertigo

Nam Le Guanajuato

Troubadour

Kim Cheng Boey

Words Together Are Melody

Keyna Eleison

We Hear the Sound of the Ancestral Forest

Linh Nga Niê Kdam

Gourd-Women

Creuza Krahô

Nude Protests in Africa, the Digital, and the Human Naminata Diabate

Horizon of Fullness

Hervé Yamguen

Vortex Recitation of Passage

Edimilson de Almeida Pereira

Ukutshisa Setting Fire to the Archive

Panashe Chigumadzi

Provisional Landscapes

Thiago de Paula Souza

The Submerged Worlds That Only the Silence of Poetry Penetrates Conjugating the H-U-M-A-N

Bonaventure Soh

Bejeng Ndikung

Of Calm and Silence

Conceição Evaristo

In: Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos. Rio de Janeiro: Malê, 2021. Translated from Portuguese

When I bite the word, please, don’t rush me, I want to chew, tear between my teeth, the skin, the bones, the marrow of the verb, so I might versify the core of things.

When my gaze gets lost in nothingness, please, don’t wake me, I want to retain, within the depth of the iris, the faintest shadow, of the slightest movement.

When my feet slow their march, please, don’t push me. To walk – what for? Let me stay, let me be still, in apparent inertia. Not all travellers walk roads, there are submerged worlds that only the silence of poetry penetrates.

Not All Travellers Walk Roads Of Humanity as Practice

A Concept in Three Fragments

Bonaventure Soh

Bejeng Ndikung

February 2024

Disclaimer

This Bienal is not about identities and their politics, not about diversity nor inclusion, not about migration nor democracy and its failures…

Claimer

It is about humanity as a verb and a practice, about encounter(s) and the negotiations upon the meeting of varying worlds, it is about dismantling asymmetries as a prerequisite for humanity as a practice, it is about joy and beauty and their poeticalities as the gravitational forces that keep our worlds on their axes… for joy and beauty are political. It is about imagining a world in which we place an accent on our humanities.

Fragment I – Da calma e do silêncio

Quando eu morder a palavra, por favor, não me apressem, quero mascar, rasgar entre os dentes, a pele, os ossos, o tutano do verbo, para assim versejar o âmago das coisas.

Quando meu olhar se perder no nada, por favor, não me despertem, quero reter, no adentro da íris, a menor sombra, do ínfimo movimento.

Quando meus pés abrandarem na marcha, por favor, não me forcem. Caminhar para quê?

Deixem-me quedar, deixem-me quieta, na aparente inércia. Nem todo viandante anda estradas, há mundos submersos, que só o silêncio da poesia penetra.

Conceição Evaristo, “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence] 1

The concept for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo is a proposal to think, listen to, see, feel, perceive the world from the vantage point of Brazil – its histories, landscapes, philosophies, mythologies, and complexities – for the fiction that is Brazil is a culmination of many worlds and their tangents. That said, the emphasis will be laid on listening as the fundamental ground for practicing humanity. As Jacques Attali wrote in his seminal essay Noise: The Political Economy of Music, “for twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.”2 We seem to have inherited a world crafted by people who have tried to see the world and read the world. One could say that, to conjugate humanity as a verb, one must learn to listen to the world, listen to lands, listen to plants and animals, listen to people, listen to the voices of the waves that caress the shores, to the grumbling of waters, to the winds that carve the sand and the contours of the earth, listen to the murmurs of stones and hills and mountains, listen to the plethora of beings that make up our estuaries. It is safe to say that there is a correlation between the impossibilities of listening and dehumanization, as well as the disenfranchisement of people, the appropriation of lands, and ultimately the destruction of the environment.

In this proposal, the physical and philosophical space of the estuary will be used as a metaphor for spaces of encounter, of negotiations, of exchange, of living, of survival, of nourishment, of struggle, of despair, of repair, of rehabilitation, of needs… spaces in which practices of humanity could acquire new meanings.

From the Santos Estuary or the Bertioga Estuary in São Paulo to the Capibaribe Estuary in Recife and the Patos Lagoon

Estuary that extends from Porto Alegre to Rio Grande, the moment when two waterways meet each other, like a river meeting the sea, is a moment of negotiation of physical and chemical asymmetries that creates an extraordinary ecosystem flourishing with crabs, crocodiles, fish, migratory birds, mangroves, oysters, phytoplankton, snails, seagrass, sea turtles, zooplankton, and even humans. The particularity of an estuary is its interdependence. Each being has a role, a niche (for example, the niche of oysters is filtration, with each oyster filtering up to 50 gallons of water per day), in the sustenance of each species, in the ecosystem at large, and in the blossoming biodiversity, especially thanks to the varying salinity levels that arise when sweet water meets salty water. Estuaries are thus important for a vast spectrum of beings as habitat, resource, space for reproduction or transition in our ecosystems, and their existences are crucial for our environments. Estuaries serve as coastal buffers in times of erosions, floodings, or storms, just as they help in filtering freshwater. But due to massive urbanization, dredging, overfishing, pollution, oil and gas drilling etc. on a planetary scale, the ecosystems of estuaries are losing balance, just as humanity is losing its grip on itself and the world.3 By invoking the plurality of beings and their co-existence and contingencies within that space of the estuary as a metaphor for human relations with themselves and others, the project tangentially alludes to the 27th Bienal de São Paulo in 2006, titled How to Live Together and curated by Lisette Lagnado, as well as the 2nd Bienal, in 1953 (also called “Guernica Bienal”), in terms of the agencies and urgencies at stake.

So when Conceição Evaristo writes in “Da calma e do silêncio” that “Not all travellers/ walk roads/ there are submerged worlds/ that only the silence/ of poetry penetrates,” one can think of estuaries as the epitome of those submerged worlds penetrable by the silence of nature’s poetry and at the same time as the path of coexistence that is woven when the different worlds of sweet and salty water encounter each other, as a path that humankind as travellers could take. Brazil was birthed by the violent encounter of Indigenous people, European colonizers and enslaved Africans. Every civilization stems from an encounter, no matter how violent some might be, and some take more time than others to germinate. For the germination and proper cultivation to happen, one might need patience to bite and tear words to the marrow of verbs, stamina to stare into the distance so that clarity of the

smallest movements in the far can be impregnated inside one’s iris, as Evaristo insinuates.

So which paths do we take in the practice of humanity as a verb? How do we afford ourselves the privilege of going off track, off the road, embracing errancy, getting lost, finding other worlds?

Fragment II – Une Conscience en fleur pour autrui

Ma joie est de savoir que tu es moi et que moi je suis fortement toi.

Tu sais que ton froid dessèche mes os et que mon chaud vivifie tes veines.

Ma peur fait trembler tes yeux et ta faim fait pâlir ma bouche.

Sans ta force d’être un feu libre ma conscience serait plus seule que la terre morte d’un désert.

Ma vie offre des clefs émerveillées à la perception de ta propre essence.

Lorsque tu veilles sur ma liberté tu donnes un ciel et des ailes au mouvement de mon espérance.

Mon désir d’être heureux, s’il cessait un instant de compter avec le tien tomberait aussitôt en poussière.

Quand tu saignes au couteau mon identité nos consciences vont ensemble à l’abattoir.

[My joy is knowing that you are me, and that I am deeply you.

You know your cold dries out my bones, and my warmth brings life to your veins. My fear makes your eyes tremble, and your hunger pales my mouth. Without your power to be a free flame, my awareness would be more alone than the dead earth of a desert.

My life offers enchanted keys to the perception of your very essence. When you guard my liberty,

you give wings and sky to the motion of my hope. My longing to be happy – should it cease to reckon with your own, even for a moment –would fall at once to dust. When you cut my identity with a knife, our minds go together to the slaughterhouse.]

René Depestre, “Une Conscience en fleur pour autrui” [A Blossoming Conscience for Others].4

The artist Leo Asemota once asked the question: when you look in the mirror, who do you see? He went ahead to respond himself that there is of course the possibility of seeing only yourself, but when he looks in the mirror, he sees all the people who came before him and all in his keeping. This spirit of vertical and horizontal interconnectedness might be another crucial element in the conjugation of humanity.

In this era of deep political and social crisis in which we find ourselves in the world, the question of who we see when we look in the mirror becomes even more important. To see a multitude in the mirror is to recognize the existence, the concerns, and eventually care for the well-being.

The nation-state is one of those constructs that seem to see only itself when it looks in the mirror. That’s why we fortify our borders with walls, fight wars, expel migrants, destroy the environment etc. Could we actually look into the mirror and see humanity? In all its shapes and colors, with all its long- and shortcomings, with all its shades of grey, and all its imperfections? As it stands, the mirror in which we seem to be stirring is shattered into pieces, and instead of a reflection we seem to be seeing infinite refractions that lead to oblivion. But even a broken mirror can be mended. To engage in that process of mending, however, one must allow oneself to be guided by and consent to René Depestre’s maxims in “Une Conscience en fleur pour autrui”: “My joy is knowing that you are me,/ and that I am deeply you” or “My life offers enchanted keys/ to the perception of your very essence.”

Humanity is a practice.

Humanity is a verb. It can be conjugated.

Fragment III – The Adamant Beauty of the World

Rising from the abyss

is the sound of centuries. The song of Ocean’s valleys.

On the Atlantic Ocean floor sonorous seashells tangle with skulls, bones, and iron balls turned green. These depths hold the cemeteries of slave ships and of the many men who sailed them. Deeds of a greedy Western world, violated borders, flags raised and fallen. […] But these transported Africans undid the separations of the world. They too opened up the Americas’ vast spaces with violent bloodshed. […]

The remains of these ancestors shipped away to become the silt of the abysses, all those former worlds, were ground down until they truly became a new place. One world made Africa laminary. The Africas impregnated distant worlds. This fact makes it possible to see the Whole-World and to comprehend it – the Tout-Monde given to everyone, valid for everyone, multiple in its totality, based on the sonorous abysses.

Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, “The Adamant Beauty of the World”5

The estuary of Recife is a space of multiple encounters. Not only the meeting of sweet and salt water, but also the first port in the Americas where enslaved people abducted from Africa encountered the so-called new world. Since its founding in 1537 upon Portuguese colonization, Recife has been a remarkable site in which that which has emerged from that abyss, that chasm, despite despicable violences, has been able to manifest its intractable, adamant beauty. A site in which the rumors from and of the depths of that abyss still resonate in all engulfing ripples and manifest themselves as that notion of Tout-Monde.

That “adamant beauty of the world” birthed, in Brazil, some of the most important artistic and cultural movements of the 20th century: the “anthropofagia movement” of the 1920s, that gave form to and informed a Brazilian avant-garde and led both

to the “Manifesto Antropófago” and an aesthetics and politics that Oswald de Andrade called “Cannibalist transnationalism” (a philosophy that called for the cannibalization, the ingestion, and the digestion of other cultures as a way of asserting Brazil against European colonial and post-colonial cultural domination, as was so magnificently exposed in the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff with Adriano Pedrosa); the Teatro Experimental do Negro [Black Experimental Theater] (TEN), a movement founded by Abdias do Nascimento in 1944 to tackle the dearth of Black presence and dignity in the national performing arts, initiating a movement of Afro-Brazilian playwriting that also engaged politically by bringing the anti-racism struggles to the 1946 Constituent Assembly and influencing “the proposition of the Afonso Arinos Act, the first legislation geared to curb racism;”6 the Cinema Novo’s “Eztetyka da Fome” [Aesthetics of Hunger] movement, filmically formulated by Glauber Rocha in 1965, understanding cinema as an important tool and weapon for the revolutionary struggle; the Tropicalismo movement of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and Torquato Neto in the 1960s, advocating with their Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis manifesto for a “field for reflection on social history” through music, film, and other artistic expressions that synchronized African and Brazilian cultures and found a political voice at the height of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship; or the Manguebit movement of the 1990s in Recife, that stood for a musical revolt against the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural stagnation, for a resistance to the neoliberal agenda that had usurped most of Latin America, that advocated for a cultural memory that embraced all the aforementioned attributes (“given in all, valid for all, multiple in its totality”), and that opted for a way-out of the socioeconomic cul-de-sac through a pidginization of sonic scapes and genres like makossa, Congolese rumba, reggae, coco, forró, maracatu, frevo, as much as rock, hip hop, electronic music, and funk. The Manguebit movement and its manifesto “Caranguejos com cérebro” [Crabs with Brains], written in 1992 by singer Fred Zero Quatro and DJ Renato L, were brought to life by two legendary bands and two albums from 1994 whose titles betray their intentions: Mundo Livre S/A’s Samba esquema noise [Samba Scheme Noise] and Chico Science & Nação Zumbi’s Da lama ao caos [From Mud to Chaos]. This is the crux of Fragment III.

In “Manguebit,” the very first song on Samba esquema noise, Mundo Livre S/A sings of the transistor, of Recife as a circuit and the country as a chip; they sing of Manguebit as a virus that contaminates the eyes, ears, languages, sound waves, and this virus is spread through UHF with the help of needle-antennas inserted in the mangrove in the estuaries. They sing of the land as radio and the destruction of the land and the tributaries. This was an anthem for the strange times then and now.

Chico Science & Nação Zumbi’s first song in Da lama ao caos, titled “Monólogo ao pé do ouvido (vinheta) / Banditismo por uma questão de classe,” is a fierce double hymn of defiance. In “Monólogo ao pé do ouvido,” they sing of their movement as a musical evolution to modernize the past, they sing of how fear gives rise to evil and how the collective feels the need to fight against pride, arrogance, glory, and how demons destroy the fierce power of humanity: “Viva Zapata!/ Viva Sandino!/ Viva Zumbi!/ Antônio Conselheiro/ All Black Panthers/ Lampião.” And in “Banditismo por uma questão de classe” they tell a story of bandits, of the talk of solutions and progress, and how this can be done with the killing of innocent people by the forces of law and order. They sing of banditry as survival, as a necessity, as a consequence of class struggles.

That these bands refer to a free world and to Zumbi’s nation in their names is no coincidence. That they are from Recife is no coincidence either. After all, it was in Recife that the I Congresso Afro-Brasileiro took place in 1934, including activists like Solano Trindade – who was, by the way, also part of the Frente Negra Pernambucana and the Teatro Experimental do Negro.7 And even more importantly, it was in the states of Pernambuco and Alagoas that the great Francisco Zumbi (1655–1695) of Kongo heritage, who went down in history as Zumbi dos Palmares, claimed his kingdom, fought against the Portuguese colonialists, resisted against the enslavement of Africans, freed his people, and resettled them in the kingdom of Maroons, the Quilombos, that Abdias do Nascimento was later to qualify as some of the first democratic spaces and structures in what is today Brazil. The Quilombos were the foundation on which movements like Manguebit could be built more than 300 years later.

Fragment III is a deliberation on the Manguebit movement and its manifesto “Caranguejos com cérebro,” understood as an exposé of a collective social brain.

In Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich’s 2016 paper “Innovation in the Collective Brain,” they reflect on something many in non-Western cultures have actually known since time immemorial:

Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. Individuals connected in collective brains, selectively transmitting and learning information, often well outside their conscious awareness, can produce complex designs without the need for a designer – just as natural selection does in genetic evolution. The processes of cumulative cultural evolution result in technologies and techniques that no single individual could recreate in their lifetime, and do not require its beneficiaries to understand how and why they work. Such cultural adaptations appear functionally well designed to meet local problems, yet they lack a designer.8

The authors elaborate on the origins and machinations of collective brains by discussing their “neurons” and pointing out how individual brains evolve in accordance with the acquisition of culture – the so-called cultural brains (brains that evolved primarily for the acquisition of adaptive knowledge). Which is to say that “our cultural brains evolved in tandem with our collective brains.” Muthukrishna and Henrich show how “cultural brains are linked into collective brains that generate inventions and diffuse innovations,” as well as examine the ways in which “collective brains can feed-back to make each of their constituent cultural brains ‘smarter’ – or at least cognitively better equipped to deal with local challenges.”9

The threads with which the fabric, the cultural brain, the collective brain of Recife, of the “Caranguejos com cérebro” were woven span from the encounter of the different worlds that were forced to cross paths almost 500 years ago, as well as the different social entities, from the family to the plantation to the samba school, to different social networks. As Muthukrishna and Henrich point out,

the most basic structure of the collective brain is the family. Young cultural learners first gain access to their parents,

and possibly a range of alloparents (aunts, grand-fathers, etc.). Families are embedded in larger groups, which may take many forms, from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to villages, clans, and “big man” societies, from chiefdoms to states with different degrees of democracy, free-markets and welfare systems, to large unions.10

Next to the people, the geographical and geological bearings of Recife also play an important role in the manifestation of that cultural and collective brain that birthed the Manguebit movement. Recife is situated at the confluence of the Beberibe and Capibaribe rivers, as they proceed in their majesty to empty themselves in that massive body of water, the South Atlantic Ocean, from whose belly, from whose vault, the voices still sing. Topography and climate also contribute in the making of knowledge. With its tropical forest, high rainfall, its monsoon climate, its estuaries, high relative humidity, Recife has been called the daughter of the mangrove, with its Parque dos Manguezais that too lends its name to Manguebit. But this natural, ecological richness of Recife which could be a dream for some became a nightmare for the people of Recife. In Alice de Souza’s article “Life Reborn in the Mud,”11 she writes about Ilha de Deus [God’s Island], an island of Recife that had been generally neglected to its decrepitude in the 1970s and 1980s – there was no water, no electricity, no attention from the government. In the middle of these dire sociopolitical and economic conditions, the island was called Ilha sem Deus [Godless Island]. As if the neglect of Ilha de Deus wasn’t enough, in 1983, two nearby factories provoked an environmental disaster by dumping waste from soap production into the water, thereby intoxicating fish and sea plants, which were the main means of subsistence in the area. This lead to starvation and mass exodus of the islanders in search of greener pastures. At the same time, criminality skyrocketed on the island, which had become a hiding place for gangs. This was not restricted to Ilha de Deus, as the ruthless construction in Recife, the intoxication of the environment by industries, the dumping of waste in the rivers, and the perishing of lives in the city’s mangroves (that had become oversaturated with plastic and other wastes) led to an auto-suffocation. If the rivers and estuaries of Recife were the veins and arteries of the place, then the city was suffering from a terrible thrombosis.

It was against this backdrop that the Manguebit movement emerged as a cultural revolution in the 1990s, basically to say “No more,” accompanied by several environmental groups that planned to replant mangrove seedlings, folding sleeves and going knee-deep into the mud to clear the estuaries from plastic.12 This new movement came with a new sound: Manguebit.

Fragment III of this Bienal will pay homage to the Manguebit movement, as a descendant of all the great movements that ever came out of Brazil. As Melcion Mateu writes in his essay “Nação Zumbi: Two Decades of ‘Crabs with Brains’ (and Still Hungry)”:

The term “manguebit” is itself a hybrid, portmanteau word containing a reference to local landscape (“mangue” as said, “mangrove swamp,” “marshland”) and global technology (“bit” or binary digit, as in computer science): a movement rooted in its landscape but connected to the global technology […]. A parabolic antenna put in the mud became the concept image to describe a movement that aspired to connect the local culture to the global scene.13

Which is to say that the Manguebit is a conceptual paradigm that brings together the notions of maternity, fertility, diversity and productivity with the notion of a technology, digital media or computation that can facilitate syncretism, that can bridge the gap not only across the Atlantic, but between those that survived on land and those still locked up in that abyss. Technology in this context serves a double purpose of connecting but also subverting. Manguebit should also be understood as the possibility of creating technologies, sciences, and arts that not only reflect the quotidian, but are also fundamental for the subversions of the terrors of normativity. The technologies and sciences that were conceived to disprivilege the masses are actually misappropriated and perverted from their original purposes, in what we might call weapons of mass subversion.

The Manguebit manifesto “Caranguejos com cérebro” directly relates to the people of Recife, who are colloquially referred to as crabs living in the mangrove. Crabs, like some other lobsters and shrimps, are known to be masters of navigation of their territories and even territories unknown, since they have

a sophisticated memory. They have been found to have the cognitive capacity for complex learning despite their rudimentary brains. In the article “Clever Crustaceans,” Erica Westly states that crabs “can remember the location of a seagull attack and learn to avoid that area. In mammals, this kind of behavior requires multiple brain regions, but a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that the C. granulatus crab can manage with just a few neurons.”14 The experiments made by neuroscientists at the Universidad de Buenos Aires to test the memory skills of crabs showed that they could retain information for more than 24 hours, which is the clinical benchmark for long-term memory in most animals, including humans. And even more: they showed the ability to apply their acquired knowledge for their well-being and survivor. The researchers attributed this behavior to the crabs’ lobula giant neurons, that might have the possibility of storing information about different stimuli. It is known that crabs learn from their mistakes, that they are ambidextrous, that they have a sense of compassion that leads them to protect their territory, and that crab mothers are very caring, and are said to place snail shells around their young ones to increase their calcium intake.

This is an invitation for artists, scholars, and people from varying walks of life to reflect on the social and cultural brain of the collective, which embodies the ambidexterity, intelligence, and prudence of the crabs as a way of being in the world, as a way of being better humans. This is also an invitation for them to deliberate on spaces like estuaries and mangroves, spaces that are evidence of solidarity, a coexistence of a variety of beings, plants, animals, and mycelia that mostly assist and subsist each other, if left alone by the human. So, if such creatures with what we, humans, might call “primitive brains” could exercise such proficient memories and such compassion, why can’t humans? Or can they?

The relationship between crabs and humans that is central to the Manguebit movement had already been described in Josué de Castro’s seminal novel Of Men and Crabs, published in 1967. By then, Josué de Castro had earned fame for his path-breaking ecological work on the politics of hunger titled The Geography of Hunger, published in 1946. Being a physician in Recife, De Castro had done studies with workers’ and declared that their “basal disease” was hunger, that manifested itself

clinically as anemia, protein-calorie malnutrition, and more. He linked the socio-economic realities of the people of Recife to their biological manifestation of hunger. In his later work Of Men and Crabs, written while in exile in Paris, he tells a fictional tale of poverty related to his childhood, narrating the tragic life of the young João Paulo. The author interweaves the story of the pathetic condition of all the people around the boy with the story of Father Aristides, whose craving for the guaiamum crabs is insatiable. In that space of exile, and hopelessness, De Castro gifted the world a book that paints the reality of “the wretched of the earth.” It is no surprise that the main character João Paulo disappears during a disastrous flood that literally erases the whole settlement. But as De Castro writes, what we take with us is, “humans fashioned of crab meat, thinking and feeling like crabs; amphibians, at home on land and in water, half-man, half-animal; fed, in their infancy, on that miry milk, crab broth.”15

These relationalities of beings across land and waters, those in the swamps, so playfully and critically put forth by Mundo Livre S/A and Chico Science & Nação Zumbi, these relationalities between different genres, between gods and humans and other existences put forth by Mário de Andrade, these relationalities proposed by De Castro, these relationalities that mediate the rumors from several centuries ago to the rumors of today, that negotiate between the voices in the vault and the voices of those who are still surviving… all these relations speak to an exhaustive and resilient brain: the Mangue brain. The first Mangue manifesto, “Caranguejos com cérebro,” was structured as a trilogy: “Mangue –The Concept,” “Manguetown – The City,” “Mangue – The Scene”… Now we can imagine “Mangue – The Exhibition.” An exhibition that negates the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest, but advocates for co-existence, interdependence, love, joy, beauty as the basis for the intractable, adamant beauty of the world.

Structure

Exhibition/Manifestation: the exhibition brings together artists from the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, working across disciplines and experimenting on content and container to have their works manifest in the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. A special emphasis will be laid on sonic practices.

Invocations/Tributaries: staying true to the metaphor of the estuary, the tributary as a concept is evoked here to connote the spaces through which one waterbody flows into another. In this project, Tributaries are cultural programs that have been developed with institutions in São Paulo and around the world that will host discursive and performative formats (lectures, workshops, poetry, music, installations, performances). The programs that take place in the run-up to the Bienal exhibition are called Invocations, and those that take place in parallel are called Tributaries. The deliberations from the Invocations inform the manifestations at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion and Ibirapuera Park. They are a tangential reference to the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo in 2016, curated by Jochen Volz, wherein Study Days were organized in four cities around the world.

Public Program: the public program is furnished with a series of performances, sonic gestures, storytelling sessions, and lectures. At the core of the public program will be the “Radio du conte vivant,” reminiscent of the Mobile Radio project of the 30th Bienal de São Paulo in 2012, curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas and titled The Imminence of Poetics. But “Radio du conte vivant” takes its cue from the seminal lecture of Patrick Chamoiseau16 with the title “Circonfession esthetique – le conteur, la nuit et le panier” [Aesthetic Circonfession – The Storyteller, the Night, and the Basket], wherein the author discusses the importance of “oraliture” as a core narrative strategy in Caribbean cultures, employing “tales, word games, rhymes, riddles, songs, a popular philosophy carried by proverbs […].” He adds that “transmission is therefore essentially done without many words, through proximity, observation, imitation, sensation, humility, and that dose of unconsciousness that is necessary to aspire to become a master of the word.”

Educational program: so storytelling as a practice of conjugating humanity will be the modus operandi for the public and educational programs, and that goes in line with what Chinua Achebe said when asked in a 1998 interview “what is the importance of stories,” he responded:

Well, it is story(telling) that makes us human. And that’s why we insist. Whenever we are in doubt about who we

are, we go to stories because this is one thing that we have done in the human race. There is no group that doesn’t do it. It seems to be central to the very nature, to the very fact of our humanity to tell who we are. And to let that story keep us in mind of this. Because there will be days when we are not quite sure whether we are human or even more commonly whether other people are human. It is in the story that we get this continuity of this affirmation that you are human and that your humanity is contingent on the humanity of your neighbor.17

Choir: an important part of both public and educational programs is the creation of The Tout Moun Choir for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, as well as collaborations with local choirs. The choir owes its name to the maxim of the Haitian revolution, “Tout moun se moun,” that pronounces every human as equal, that declares that every human is a human and therefore has the right to be treated as such with the required respect and dignity. Choirs are the epitome of collective interdependence.

Adoption of artworks: citizens are invited to adopt artworks in the cause of the exhibition. By doing so, they have access to the artists and can also serve as mediators between the artworks and the audiences.

1 See the translation of this poem on page 25 of this volume.

2 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Transl. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

3 Emily Caffrey, “The Importance of Estuarine Ecosystems,” Ocean Blue Project. Available at: oceanblueproject.org/what-is-anestuary/. Accessed in: 2025.

4 René Depestre, En État de poésie (Petite sirène). Paris: Les éditeurs français réunis, 1980.

5 Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, “The Adamant Beauty of the World (2009),” in Manifestos. London: Goldsmiths Press, 2022, pp.33-55.

6 “O teatro dentro de mim,” Itaú Cultural, 2016. Available at: ocupacao.icnetworks.org/ocupacao/abdias-nascimento/o-teatrodentro-de-mim/. Accessed in: 2025.

7 Amurabi Oliveira, “Afro-Brazilian Studies in the 1930s: Intellectual Networks between Brazil and the USA,” Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies, v.8, n.1-2, 2019.

8 Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich, “Innovation in the Collective Brain,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Mar. 19, 2016. Available at: royalsocietypublishing.org/ doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192. Accessed in: July 2025.

9 Ibid., p.10.

10 Ibid., p.10.

11 Alice de Souza, “Life Reborn in the Mud,” Believe Earth, Nov. 17, 2017. Available at: believe.earth/en/life-reborn-in-the-mud/. Accessed in: July 2025.

12 Idem.

13 Melcion Mateu, “Nação Zumbi: Two Decades of ‘Crabs with Brains’ (and Still Hungry),” Crítica Latinoamericana, Dec. 5, 2012.

14 Erica Westly, “Clever Crustaceans,” Scientific American Mind, v.22, n.5, Nov. 2011, p.14.

15 Josué de Castro, Of Men and Crabs. Trans. by Susan Hertelendy. New York: Vanguard, 1970.

16 Patrick Chamoiseau, “Discours inaugural de la Chaire d’écrivain en résidence,” Sciences Po, Paris, Jan. 27, 2020.

17 “Nigerian Author Chinua Achebe in 1998,” New York State Writers Institute, Oct. 1998. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vKDupjm2fU8. Accessed in: July 2025.

Entrance Tsitsi Jaji

In memoriam, GLJ

And the crab clamors from the sands above and the sands below: do not call me crustacean! I am elephant, I am zebra, although less so, and I am dragon’s tail, dragon’s doggish breath. I am warthog, crowned with people, I am the teacher of teachers. I am daughter of the giraffe’s most devoted followers.

I am the traffic of peonies between air and earth, each year flashes by in heat, caught in this long and general dying made obvious centuries ago. I am not not the scattered pods of thieves who measure loot by compass and rule. Together, I am the hunter of squirrel, and the hunter of mouse. In my eyes you will find the memory of how one river flew into aquamarine and another into ice.

Do not call me crustacean! Do as I do: dance the spider dance in every direction. We are choking on oil’s hard beads, and above us the sunlight browns for crab and crab sign alike. I am heaven’s crab, and the spider teeming below.

I am bolder than my stories, and the stuff of yours. I am white woman clinging to my deep black love – mine a year short of the golden one, mine because I am his, ever clawing at each other’s shells. We are what worried you most, immortal in this glorious chaos that is our children’s children’s children. Sing it. Sing of how I and I enter the territory through the bloody breach of mother thighs. All of us egged, but not the absolute all. Look at the turtle. Look at the nematodes in their sandy columns. Look at the matrescent dome below, and look at the blue phallus on the other’s belly. See the shells differ as stark as salt and sweet, the genetics of here and gone. We are living mirrors living on each side. Consider it joy. Love the stiff undergardens and windbreaks, the crabgrasses and the sea grapes.

The seam of reflection gathers us for a fiery tale, the utter stasis of its arc. You will end, as I, as our forebears who knew not to spell us human, lest this daze man and work woman to death. In the long mirror of our age we keep more and more company. More hands turn crabby with wear, more moods sour on occasion. When you came you howled out, when you came you were ravenous without teeth and your first urgency was the lesson of suck/swallow/survive.

Child as elder, mirror’s farthest reach is our grand entrance into land after salt. We float without weight, in and of the earth. Twice crabbed crawlers: on each end we have yet to walk. Our language drifts in and out of speech. Sense is made by others. Choice perplexes, intention grasps and ends. We rest more, with our eyes closed. We watch the middle age stare at its pores in the reflection, close up where prime selves perch at high tide. They are troubled by what they see, so they add color, or muscle, or look for someone to disdain. We watch from the nether poles of time, twice infants, for the estuary’s embrace begins with us. Root.

Do not trap us in your grammar, caged below the surface. Do not send us on your errand. We are all arrivants: a destination would only beach us in the lurid desert. From before water we are here/after water we are elephant, we are soft shell, we are crowds of scuttled fish. From the now on, we are the conjugation of the amoeba’s first membrane. This infinitesimal eon we hurtled through has been the morass, the gelid dark mystery on the other side of Light. We dwell in this endless portal, the vulva between lifeblood and life, always water, always breaking, always coupling.

Spreading Clouds

Etel Adnan

To June Jordan

In: The Indian Never Had a Horse & Other Poems. Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 1995.

Spreading clouds loading lead hang on this land

I wanted to sing new operas to the Sierras over the dead bodies of the Flower-Children but it ended in shrieks and silences.

The new ancestors are laying at the foot of other mountains and other graves:

Malcolm X Martin Luther King Abdel Kader the Sufi soldier and all of you Indian Chiefs whose tears are the great storms of California.

We stand alone. Armored vehicles gather the young in deadly harvest

marchers protesters chained unchained with futile songs on their lips sacrifice to the last god of Peace

even that god we shall forsake: for the corn that grows on the mountain slopes of Guatemala.

Indian nations we need the wisdom which descends into your daily visions

look what we did to our common mother Earth!

God is woman if God is to be creator

But we are all part and agent of a continuous creation: we do not want to split heads nations or atoms . . .

in the darkest prison cells there is always a light which illuminates the world

let us not become the Great Extinguishers of Life throwing our children in the Great Furnace.

O the evil beauty of hell which haunts those in power!

I see Indians carry the body of Guevara through jungles which faded like roses because of his death.

When it rains angels cry for mercy: the human race they say is in danger what would angels become if we disappeared?

I see the Greek eyes of my mother looking over the agony of my Arab father

two civilizations were dying together two strange lovers were saying goodbye to the world

I don’t want to watch our planet go the way they did:

reluctantly having learned the great secret at the moment of the Great Journey.

We are not primitive enough to beg the mighty to spare our continents their weapons escape our strength

do not be fooled: Jesus is not coming we are one people distributed into many branches

the family tree crosses the Great Ocean.

My friend went to Nicaragua and learned a different kind of weather she can’t live away from a certain season the season of her love she knows the inexistence of Latin America it is of Indian America that we spoke

500 years of Spanish Inquisition did not crush the language of the wind.

We stay behind in our pitiful bedrooms the football game is our Iliad and the presidential jet our Odyssey

but there where it is hot so close to the Equator that the sky starts to spin there are people whose eyes never died whose hearts bleed blood and passion the Indians are coming . . .

They have machetes for the tall grass that covers the face of the sun.

I Declare

Abdellatif Laâbi

In: Je Rêve le monde, assis sur un vieux crocodile. Voisins-le-Bretonneux: Rue du Monde, 2015.

Translated from French

I declare that there is no human Being but Those whose hearts tremble with love for all their brothers in humanity

Those who ardently desire more for others than for themselves: freedom, peace, dignity

Those who consider that Life is even more sacred than their beliefs and their gods

I declare that there is no human Being but Those who tirelessly fight Hatred within themselves and around them.

Those who, as soon as they open their eyes in the morning, ask themselves: What will I do today to not lose my quality and my pride of being human?

On a tous besoin de rêver (We

All Need to Dream)

Alya Sebti

You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary.1

Etel Adnan

1. On Beauty

February 2025, somewhere between Carcavelos and Lisbon. Standing by the ocean, I notice that waves move in rhythms. Big swells crash in a series of seven, then comes a moment of suspension – a moment to catch our breath. An eternal repetitive cycle. No matter what happens, even if the world seems to be crumbling, there is a chance to catch one’s breath and move after the big waves break. Big waves come in a rhythm of seven, then a lull.

Breeze, breath, respite. This morning I woke up to the petrifying news of wars, their unbearable violence and deafening silences. The far-right’s anti-immigrant policies across Europe are screaming in an echo chamber side by side with the Trump administration in the United States, which has never seemed so close to authoritarianism. Spaces of resistance for artistic and intellectual freedom are entering a state of freeze. People who express support for those who suffer are being silenced and deported. There is fear, and we forgot how to deal with it.

The very place where I stand is a threshold, at an edge of the ocean. To the south is Morocco, the country I come from, and keep coming back to. There is the Strait of Gibraltar: fourteen kilometers that separate the two continents of Africa and Europe. Fourteen kilometers that carry so much desire, repulsion, and death. While standing at this threshold, I think of the late photographer and social activist Leila Alaoui. She spent months at the border in Northern Morocco, acting as a voice and witness for those who tried to cross that strait, or those who were still dreaming about it.

She created the photography series No pasarán [They Shall Not Pass] (and later, the film Crossings) as a testimony, to carry the stories and dreams of children, youths, and parents whose voices have been dehumanized by the filters of anti-immigrant policies and propaganda. In one of her images, we see a fissured wall with the words “open up the doors or I will blow up.”

Facing west, I can almost see the cogs of the colonial machine that began turning at this very place – a history of domination, extraction, fragmentation. History repeats itself. Today, the world feels as if it is on the verge of collapse, with the explosion of simultaneous wars, the rise of extreme right-wing political parties in multiple countries using similar mechanisms of otherness to create a common enemy, the celebration of bully-based policies of territorial expansionism, a revival of toxic masculinity, all amidst an acute climate crisis that human history has never before experienced. The outside world seems to be falling apart, a dissolution of societies, deep uncertainty. They say that history is written by the winner. Will the current alliance of bullies write the history of collapse for this very moment? Will there even be a past to write about?

It is urgent that we cultivate a conscious practice of humanity. Now more than ever, it is crucial to reclaim a way of belonging to the world and committing to this belonging every single day – a practice of listening, of embracing, of remembering the ones who came before us and acting for the ones who will come after us. It is a decision to resist and fight for a humanity that recognizes togetherness and interconnection at the core of its practice. But when everything feels like it is collapsing, how can we find the inspiration and strength to move?

Then it hits me: I look at the ocean’s striking beauty, the waves’ reassuring repetition, the harmony of the elements, a majestic and calm strength. I hear my kids laughing, running barefoot on the sand after a seagull. Rays of light pierce the clouds, carving out space and reflecting off the waves and lines of foam like mirrors. I see the violent beauty that Adnan referred to. “Struck by lightning, a soft lightning,” she wrote. And if that bolt of lightning makes us first stop, then lose balance – if there is a moment in which we open our arms and don’t know what to do – something crucial happens at the same time. It is a gestation of a vital strength that provides a chance to define a new rhythm, a will of action to make a change.

As we witness this moment of accelerated fragmentation, I believe beauty is essential to thriving in this world, and the experience of it can be a driving force that makes humanity move, walk, want to be together, and march toward change. To me, beauty is not a Western, societally infused ideal based on symmetry; it is not a polished surface to be commodified. Beauty is a force that pulses through the body and unsettles the known. Beauty is resonance. It is the trembling of voices in unison, the rhythm of collective breath, the generosity of presence. It is friction, vulnerability, and depth. It touches something sensory and intimate – it moves the heart, stirs the soul, compels us to act, to gather, to remember. Beauty is a necessity. A compass. A way to resist fragmentation. As Diane Lima wrote in her essay for the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, “It is for the search of beauty that we defy the impossible.”2 Not merely to survive, but as a driving force to remember, reinvent, and practice connectedness to others. Beauty is a carrier of hope, a reminder that we belong together.

In Mother Earth’s Laments, the song he wrote for the installation conceived for the 36th Bienal, artist Emeka Ogboh created a moment in which sadness can be transformed into hope and will to change, touched and carried by the beauty of the rhythm and the depth of the voice. Despite the alarming situation of a weakened Earth, there remains a window of time to repair and make changes.

Oh, my children, hear my final song, Before silence takes what has been all along. Yet seeds of change can still grow strong Will you rise to heal where you’ve done wrong?

Emeka Ogboh, Mother Earth’s Laments

This is the sentence I hold on to: “Yet seeds of change can still grow strong.” There is still time to rise and heal where we’ve done wrong.

For the experience of beauty through art to become a force for societal change, it must be accessible beyond the walls of exclusive circles. Art and its beauty cannot be a quiet refuge for a privileged audience. In order for art to challenge dominant narratives, serve as a catalyst for reflection and action, and encourage

critical thinking about injustice and inequality, it must become a shared space, a living energy. Art must move; it must circulate and be shared. It must wander streets, enter homes, gather voices. Only then can it challenge dominant narratives, stir collective memory, and open pathways to new imaginaries.

Yet politicians are talking about a Zeitenwende:3 a paradigm shift. Cultural initiatives around the world are threatened by drastic funding cuts in favor of allocations to defense and weaponization. In this increasingly precarious cultural landscape, an institution such as the Bienal de São Paulo can be a fortress of resistance with its long-lasting history of freedom, open access, and priority given to education and mediation. It is crucial to strengthen the conversations, create alliances between islands of resistance that place the accessibility of art and critical thinking at the center of their practice.

One of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo’s fundamental gestures takes shape through invitations to several cultural institutions to think together about humanity as a practice. The Conjugations and Tributaries programs are woven into the very fabric of the curatorial process. Developed in collaboration with artistic and cultural institutions across the globe, Conjugations is a constellation of workshops, performances, lectures, and activations within the Bienal Pavilion. The Tributaries take place in each of the local partner institutions: Casa do Povo and La Friche. Each venue is invited to conjugate the notion of humanity from within its own geography, history, and vocabulary, offering plural readings that expand, contradict, or deepen the verbs that indicate what it means to be human, strengthening alliances, and recognizing the interconnectedness to one another.

2. On Dreams

March 2025, Berlin, Neukölln. I find myself seated in a small restaurant, facing a large window that frames the city as if it were a moving archive. It is early spring – the kind of evening when Berlin begins to stretch its days, offering an ephemeral twilight. Outside, silhouettes pass: hipsters on bikes go past walls heavy with graffiti that serve as a remembrance rather than a decoration. This is the German capital’s southeast, a district that historically landed on the Berlin Wall’s western side, but just barely. Not long ago, families were divided by a dictatorship set in concrete. The sediments of

World War II and its aftermath are still evident on this ground, layered over by a peculiar lightness in the air: the two parallel dimensions, inside and outside, oscillate, seemingly ignoring each other. Inside, the waiter tells fascinating stories, not only of wine, but of a dish crafted from twenty-five delicate layers of potato. A humble architecture of care and obsession. It will be, without a doubt, the best gratin I have ever tasted.

I am meeting with Bonaventure to prepare for an interview we will be conducting in a few days with the writer and economist Jacques Attali.4 Trying to make sense of our time’s absurd, accelerated political changes means running at an even more absurd velocity. But here and now there is a moment of respite, a lull, as Bonaventure speaks about the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. “Poetry is fundamental,” he says. On a tous besoin de rêver [We all need to dream].

In her book of essays and poems Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde writes: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the poet –whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.”5 Art and poetry are woven from the same fabric as dreams – those liminal spaces where logic dissolves and deeper truths begin to murmur. If humanity is not a fixed condition but a practice, as we believe, then listening to dreams becomes a quiet, daily act of resistance against the dangerous rational certainties of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” a credo that once shaped an era and still underpins structures of domination, individualism, and separation.

To listen to dreams is to recognize our entanglement with one another, with the unseen, with the unspoken. It is to reclaim the possibility of a collective humanity shaped not by reason alone, but by feeling. Lorde’s words echo here with clarity: “I feel, therefore I can be free.” Dreams convey messages and speak beyond our common understanding of language. Listening to them and letting them guide our movement is a practice of opening up, of empathy, of accepting feelings before trying to understand.

It reminds me of a story I grew up with in Casablanca: artist Chaïbia Talal was 25 years old when she woke up from a dream and started to paint. “I see again a blue sky where sails are swirling, unknown people approaching me, giving me paper and

pencils. The next day, I immediately went to buy blue paint, the kind used to paint door frames, and I began making stains and impressions.”6 It was 1963; she was a widow working as a cleaning lady to take care of her eleven-year-old son. She followed her dream, letting it guide her artistic practice. In the time’s largely male-dominated Moroccan art scene she began to earn a living from her painting, joined a Paris-based gallery founded by the Brazilian dealer Cérès Franco, and became an internationally acclaimed artist who fought all her life against illiteracy, a condition she openly shared to have suffered from her whole life. She made sure her son, the painter Hossein Talal (1942-2022), could access education and culture as a priority.

Throughout the journey of preparing this Bienal de São Paulo, I have been in constant dialogue with artist Tanka Fonta about this liminal space between intuition, dreams, and the quest for truth. I observed how his dreams and intuition have been guiding his practice, how he recalls places he has never been before. In the musical piece he created for the Bienal, The Invocatory Call and Chants of the Ibirapuera Park, he writes about a mystical dialogue – a conversation between himself and the very essence of nature. To him, the grasses, petals, and trees each offer their unique chants, conveying messages about the interconnectedness of all life, the fluidity of time, and the universal energies that bind every being.

When Fonta talks about his practice,7 he speaks about listening to his intuition, his mission to reconnect with and to learn (or remember) the language of empathy. He creates an alphabet beyond words. Cosmology of beings, memory of unknown places, connections of the visible and the invisible. It speaks to us with words we might not understand, an alphabet we might not be able to decipher, but the mere experience of being in front of Tanka’s work is deeply moving. He manages to speak to us through a language of empathy, of connectedness. Tanka’s installation will be a mural on the emblematic anchor-shaped estuary, a figure that will embrace the three floors of the pavilion. A totem, an invocation. Artist Michele Ciacciofera reminds us that some of the first sculptures created by humankind, the menhirs, were conceived as an attempt to connect the earth and the sky.8 They were totems. The totemic forms appearing throughout the parcours of this exhibition continue this path of connecting the visible and the invisible.

3. On Silence and Movement

February 2025. Dawn. On the way to the airport, I open the WhatsApp group of the Bienal’s conceptual team. The screen lights up with devastating news: the artist and poet Frankétienne has passed away.9 My stomach tightens. I still recall our meeting a month before – his vitality, his laughter, his unwavering generosity. At 89, his creative force was a lesson in humility. He met the world with the urgency of someone who still believed in beauty as resistance. In our last exchanges, we imagined a delicate ping-pong of forms: the curatorial team would select a constellation of paintings, and Frankétienne would respond with poems – spoken aloud, offered like breath. He was radiant with excitement at the idea. He wanted to read, to give voice, to gather others around language as vibration, as movement.

“Et le rêve est revenu, dans la magie du silence musical.” [And the dream returned, in the magic of musical silence.]10

His poetry felt like a clash, and it carried my thinking into deeper waters. To carry his voice to the Bienal felt essential and urgent to everyone on the conceptual team. And now, as his longtime collaborator Hervé Sabin reminds us, plus que jamais – more than ever. His voice is with us – in the silences, in the fractures, in the spaces we continue to open for dreaming.

Je persiste à sonder les brumes et les nuages de l’horizon sous le clignotement de la toute petite flamme rebelle à la mort.

Vivre

Fremir

Bondir11

[I persist in probing the mists and clouds of the horizon beneath the flicker of the tiny flame that defies death.

To live

To tremble

To leap]

Humanity is also a practice of transitioning from one world to another. And in between, we should take action to rebel against death. To live/ To tremble/ To leap.

Taking action, as a practice of humanity, is a resistance against the static, amnesiac, and self-centered definition of humanity, whose collapse we are currently watching. When Bonaventure and I finally interviewed Attali, who bases much of his practice on exploring history and developing mechanisms to project and predict future endeavors, we asked him: if humanity could be conjugated, what would be the verb? “To walk,” he said without hesitation. “Sedentarism is a parenthesis. Everything important that has been done on this planet, in the history of humanity, was done while walking.”

The words of the legendary artist Werewere Liking come to mind, particularly her reflection on walking as a vital and essential act. “Étant la marche elle-même en tant qu’ultime action” [Being the walk itself the ultimate action]. This verse, like the entire poem “À Manthia Diawara et à tous nos rêves de renaissance – 1” [To Manthia Diawara and All Our Dreams of Rebirth – 1], speaks to the nature of life, always returning, always transforming, even through death and drought. In this sense, walking becomes a profound act of resistance: a refusal to remain stagnant in the face of adversity. It is a practice that propels us forward when everything else feels immobilizing, when we are confronted by the paralyzing forces of the world. Walking, in this context, is not just movement, but an embodied form of resistance – a gesture toward one another, toward the Earth, a continual process of renewal. She wrote this poem as she traveled, walking through remote villages between Senegal and Mali, part of La Caravane de La Poésie Gorée-Tombouctou [The Poetry Caravan Gorée-Timbuktu]. Along the way, she and twelve other poets shared their words, meeting people in the spaces between, offering poetry as a living exchange. Traveling and walking toward each other was a practice of renewal, a gesture of solidarity and connection, a refusal to be stilled and silenced.

4. On Conviction

Marrakech, 2010. I am in a meeting with Simon Njami, my mentor, shortly after curating one of my first solo exhibitions, You Never Left, by Youssef Nabil. I am filled with hope and a sense of purpose, yet there lingers an uncertainty – wondering whether my optimism in the path of curating exhibitions about beauty, eternity, and love can truly survive within the often cynical dynamics of the art

world. Listening to my hesitation, Simon looks at me and says something that would shape every step of my journey from that moment onward: It is not naïveté, it is a conviction.

That conviction, that deep-rooted belief, has been my guiding force since then. Over the past fifteen years, I have chosen to listen – really listen – to artists and poets. It is through their visions that I have come to understand beauty as resistance. They are the dreamers who carry the power to reimagine the world, to weave connections where fragmentation continues. For me, curating is about creating spaces where beauty can be heard, where the poetic becomes a tool for remembering our shared humanity. In this practice, I have found not only my vocation but my way of being in the world.

In the poem that inspired the title of this edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, Conceição Evaristo writes: “Not all travellers/ walk roads,/ there are submerged worlds/ that only the silence/ of poetry penetrates.” 12 Artists and poets are those who can navigate the submerged worlds: they create languages to access a glimpse of them. Maybe beauty can help us get closer to these concealed, invisible worlds. Now, when the world seems to be taking its last breaths, let us listen to the voices of poets and artists to find the strength to walk together for the practice of humanity. And after we listen, we must act – on behalf of, and at the behest of, the beauty we are bestowed with. Beauty can emerge from silence, or from quiet whispers, and it can be transmuted into power.

April 2025. I am listening to Ben Okri’s keynote speech at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin while I write the last lines of this essay. He, too, speaks of beauty. I quote here, from memory, his words: “Beauty must be convulsive. It cannot be passive. It needs to be vital. It has to shake us. A force of truth.” The violent beauty Etel Adnan refers to in her paragraph is maybe what creates the convulsion Okri calls for. A convulsion to recognize and feel the interconnectedness amongst beings and the soil we are living with. A convulsion to remember that humanity cannot survive being static and fragmented. A convulsion to experience the force of truth and the strength to resist and walk together toward an everyday practice of humanity.

Adnan wrote Shifting the Silence in 2020, at the age of 95. She was aware that death was approaching. As she looked into a

world staggered by wars and climate catastrophe with the painful recognition that this would be her last published book, she turned the reader’s gaze toward the light with a final recommendation: “Be planetary.”

1 Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence. New York: Nightboat Books, 2020, p.17.

2 Diane Lima, “The Impossible,” in Choreographies of the Impossible, exhibition catalog. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2023, p.28.

3 “Regierungserklärung von Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz am 27. Februar 2022,” Feb. 27, 2022. Available at: www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/ regierungserklaerung-von-bundeskanzler-olaf-scholz-am-27februar-2022-2008356. Accessed in: 2025.

4 See Jacques Attali, interview by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Alya Sebti in this volume.

5 Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You. London: Silver Press, 2017, pp.10-11.

6 Brahim Alaoui, “Chaïbia a les yeux, les mains fertiles,” diptyk, Dec. 10, 2020. Available at: www.diptykmag.com/portraitchaibia-a-les-yeux-les-mains-fertiles/. Accessed in: 2025.

7 Alya Sebti and the team from the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo met with Tanka Fonta for a conversation published in Volume 3 of the 36th Bienal’s educational publications.

8 Michele Ciacciofera, “Alfabeto del Contemporaneo,” MagaMuseo, Jun. 27, 2024. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=04ZCx70osWA. Accessed in: 2025.

9 Jean-Pierre Basilic Dantor Franck Étienne d’Argent, known by his pen name Frankétienne, was a Haitian writer, poet, playwright, and painter.

10 Frankétienne, Anthologie secrète. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2006, p.55.

11 Ibid.

12 Conceição Evaristo, “Da calma e do silêncio,” in Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos. Rio de Janeiro: Malê, 2008, p.122.

In the Indigenous Circular Time

Márcia

Wayna Kambeba

Translated from Portuguese

Not all travellers walk roads, For to see is to find the paths Where the feet of the world have never stepped, Where the wind carries words, Where leaves whisper history. Obeying the people’s circular time, Memory and speech so we may endure.

For us, humanity is not haste, It is the practice of slow steps, Of eyes that behold the unseen In the forest’s shadows, In the river’s winding song. Memory and ancestral wisdom.

To feel is to let yourself root like the tree that listens to time, that knows the rhythm of the rains and the silence of mornings.

To think is to recall what the elder says: That the universe breathes as one, That we are the hand of an endless cycle And leaves of the same branch, Life sprung from a common root. In the silence/time that dwells in me.

Not all travellers walk roads, For sometimes the path lies within, Lies in the soil of ancient memory, Lies in the fire that warms the chest, Lies in the act of listening to the world And of living, as a practice, our humanity.

Tout moun se moun

Jean Casimir

Translated from French

The Colonial Project Unveiled1

Historiography presents a narrative of Haiti’s past, based mainly on a selection of documents available in the archives of the powers defeated during the War of Independence: France, England, and Spain.2 It highlights the absences and obscurities of the memory of these powers. Their system should be corrected using our own memory. The pillaging by bandit-conquerors in the 16th century and the systematic control of the goods produced by enslaved and captive people in the 17th and 18th centuries accumulate and reinforce the power of the state, which is thus distanced from the impoverished who are dominated by increasingly insurmountable inequalities. At the end of the process, state operators and commercial companies acquire a freedom of action that is beyond the control of the institutions that promote such inequalities.

We are close to the apocalypse because, at first, researchers fascinated by the facts and actions of the modern world didn’t realize that it systematically silences the scope of the actions carried out by exploited populations. We imagine ourselves at a dead end because these actions are the only ones that anticipate and resolve their crimes. The inability of those who are dominant to accept any otherness paralyzes their audience. The diversity of the other is drowned in a kind of universality that trivializes any contestation that could go beyond everyday life and explain the ever-imminent threat of implosion.

In the case of the Haitians, after the genocide perpetrated by the bandit-conquerors, three groups of the wretched of the earth replaced that first nation: the rejects from the western shores of Europe, loosely united by a mutating feudalism; the enslaved servants who join them; and the plethora of captives abducted in the Gulf of Guinea.

Historical narratives record the existence of these vulnerable beings, describing the continuous violence that the state and its institutions implement in order to guarantee the fulfillment of their systems. The trivialization of this violence and of the suffering it causes eliminates the need for state archives to record it. Thus, the ever-new knowledge of the penalties imposed hardly changes the course of the established powers. From this perspective, we discover the links that subordinate Haiti to the colonial empires.

The Two Sides of the Colony

If, on the other hand, we seek out that which unites Haitians, we advance into a field that requires colonial empires to use brute violence relentlessly. At first, brutality is essential to their relations with the island’s inhabitants, who are defined as marginal.

Those who choose to live on the island of Tortuga – pirates and highway robbers, as well as Huguenots, Jews, and Moors – are quickly overwhelmed by the deportations of vagrants and wanderers, forced to integrate into the plantations.3 In addition to these poor devils are the captives who, for 36 months, sell themselves into slavery to pay for their passage.

As they struggle to survive, this unfortunate group produces a variety of the Antillean language that is distinct from Parisian French and comparable to the languages of the provinces they come from. This language reflects the divergence between their reality as subordinates and that of the king’s court, a distancing caused by their isolation and the social and religious discrimination imposed on their daily lives. Their use of Creole attests to their autonomy.

The Empire’s officials don’t realize that the role of Creole within this microcosm exceeds the functions of administrative management attributed to Parisian French and precedes its entry into the milieu. The precedence of the royal language comes from its power, not from its sophistication, antiquity, or generalization in this geography.

The harassment of the Spanish Inquisition led the Santo Domingo emigrants to ask the Parisian authorities for protection, and the French sent powerful mercantilist trading companies there. They promoted the establishment of wealthy farmers and merchants in the port cities, whose mastery of French was indisputable. However, such an insertion does not undermine the hegemony of the local language, as Jean Fouchard4 established in reference to “Marron” speakers.5 The use of provincial languages indicates their importance in the daily lives of small farmers and “small whites,”6 as well as their impact on the structuring of the Creole language.

To this diversity between social strata of European origin were added ethnic fractures, obscured by the perception of the remaining majority as an undifferentiated mass of Black people. Around 1700, two thirds of the population came from the Gulf of Guinea, a proportion that would reach ninety percent by the

end of the century. The country is believed to have been home to 21 different ethnic groups, including the Nago, Ashanti, Ibo, Wolof, Bambara, Hausa, Congo, and Mandingo.

The necessary adoption of Creole by these people who would be socially buried requires distinguishing the internal social relations of the colony from the political relations of this entity with its metropolis. The captives were subjugated by gravediggers, who were also exploited by the empire.

From the outset, we note that the history of the colonial state and the Haitian state can follow the path indicated by the traditional archives and arrive at the political contract that the former imposes on the latter. The history of the Haitians indicates a route whose source may flow in the opposite direction. An analysis of data that favors the plundering of local wealth, including the excessive exploitation of the workforce, can only lead to an imperial framework and prevent the emergence of a sovereign formation. In the opposite direction, an analysis of Haitian history, i.e. their incessant search for sovereignty, records the permanent erosion of any subordination to the state and the empire.

The Necessary Social Contract: Tout moun se moun

On landing, Guineans speak various West African languages. Due to their dizzying multiplication, they end up appropriating the current language and becoming part of colonial society. From the practices that this majority weaves with the people around them emerges the basis of the values of a way of thinking that is characteristic of the speakers of this language and, consequently, of the classes that speak it.7

This multiplicity of ethnic groups is transformed into an American nation as a result of exploitative conditions that go beyond what is humanly bearable. These people crossed the Atlantic in individual units deprived of everything. In a fragile state, they are only able to reduce their vulnerability through solidarity and reciprocity with fellow sufferers. To delay their death, they resort to the most basic points of contact and build new communities, and therefore new individualities, capable of turning their backs on and overcoming the key definitions of the plantation system.

As they walk through this Golgotha, these people accentuate the differences between the current language and the dominant

one, adding to it a flexibility that translates their experiences, as well as a syntax and semantics close to West African languages. They also impose a choice of categories that reorganize their reality and whose inventory is yet to be made. We can cite important actors in a story told in French who are inconceivable in Creole: the old freemen, the new freemen, and the Indigenous army are clear examples of this.

The content of the language of the captives, unlike that of the emigrants of European origin, do not coincide with the ideas and values that ordered life at the court of the kings of France and their servants. An inventory of the local language would allow us to outline the architecture of the world of the oppressed.8 The royal court and the metropolis have their “formal” archives organized according to their desire to regulate the universe and all of humanity. This wishful thinking has yet to materialize, as the very existence of Creole attests.

In everyday language, captives categorically deny that they were enslaved, even if their living conditions were determined by slavery institutions. Their perception and rejection of the injustice of their situation is perennial. Their world in formation does not allow us to determine the dates on which one or other proposal was eliminated from the dominant world, but certain milestones are visible. The preliminary social contract that unites Haitians is stipulated in the 1801 Constitution of Toussaint Louverture. Article 3 reads: “There can be no slaves in this territory, servitude is abolished forever. All men here are born, live, and die free and French.”9

To observe the achievements of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) as the only successful slave revolution is to imprison it in the history of modern-day thinking and to refuse to understand the process of contestation that began as soon as the enslaved arrived. The dominant society is ensnared in the unthinkable. It knows that socially dead beings cannot rebel; to do so, one must be “socially alive.”

The pending question is therefore how these groups of wretched people invent a social life of their own; in other words, how they form a social contract and become a nation. How do they set themselves apart from the all-powerful conquerors, forming an active and contesting community?

The expression “tout moun se moun” is used to deny any significant difference between people, considered on an individual level. In Creole, it is absurd, to say the least, to think that the nobleman is essentially superior to the commoner. This principle,

inherited from feudalism, is repugnant to Haitian thinking. On the other hand, for the oligarchies of the time, the scum of their countries – these “peoples of the last nothing”10 – as well as Black people, were inferior to them.

In the delusion of these oligarchies, the words “tout moun” would translate as a distortion of the French expression “tout le monde” [everyone]. However, the emphasis produced by the redundancy is at odds with the French of the royal court, and it seems clear that the expression cannot derive from this source, despite the obvious similarity of its assonance. The redundancy denies not the otherness between individuals, but any hierarchization of that otherness.

The people from the Gulf of Guinea who were forced to settle in Haiti were the Bantu. The term “moun” means “human,” and “mountou” is used in the singular. The expression “tout moun se moun” would therefore mean “every human being is human,” implying that everyone should be treated in the same way. Modern times are therefore going down the wrong road right from the start of the imperial adventure, because they don’t understand that the fundamental equality of those in the workforce is compatible with the diversity of their working conditions.

Another confusion needs to be cleared up. “Tou” in Haitian Creole does not translate as “tout ” [all] in French, with two t’s. In Creole, there are no silent letters, and the two words are certainly pronounced the same. But “tou” (without the final “t”) means “also.” A Haitian defends himself against some kind of affront by saying: “mwen se moun tou,” to express that he is a person and that no one can disrespect him. He doesn’t mean: “I am also a world.” Always in the same vein, and to emphasize the equality of all Bantu or humans, in our experience as oppressed people, the otherness of the other becomes superficial. The sentence “nou se menm nou menm nan” is another meaningless redundancy in the imperial language. It means that “you are simply ourselves,” but, as in “tout moun se moun,” we are responsible for eliminating the “you” and we say word for word: “We are the same ourselves.” In other words, our points of contact are much more important than our differences.

Furthermore, in the deep crisis that the Haitian state is going through today, powerless to control the headquarters of its bureaucracy and the relations of its primary city with the provinces,

if criminals break into your house and threaten to exterminate your entire family, if they give you time, you will ask: “Pou ki sa n ap touye nou? ” Translated literally: “Why are we killing each other?”

Everything, therefore, seems to indicate that, in the confrontation with the conqueror-bandits, we have managed to eliminate the “you” from our conversation. By disregarding the second person plural, do we admit that it is impossible to communicate with the “nobles,” insofar as they consider themselves as such? Does Haitian Creole recognize that there are people who, from their place of enunciation, simply cannot understand us, and vice versa? Because this primordial equality is an everyday experience, not a value to be achieved in an ultra-terrestrial paradise, whose supposed existence would not prevent us from accepting the dictates of instrumental reason.

As a result, although there is manipulation of the concept of race, which is essential for the establishment of the Western modernity that is besieging us, it remains foreign to us. The conqueror of the new harvests, unable to justify this concept rationally, imposes it through violence. The same goes for the concept of class, even if the underlying violence is shrouded in a better disguise. These concepts determine our living conditions, but these conditions do not define us and do not define the parameters of our existence. They remain external to our reality, in which “tout moun se moun.”

Dignity and Precarity

Obviously, the Haitian people live in terrible poverty. They do everything in their power to safeguard the respect and dignity that defined them in the worst moments of their history. Communities are responsible for their members and, reciprocally, answerable to them. Everyone respects the elders and the invisible ones and discusses and solves their problems in the language they have been bequeathed.

The current commotion comes from our anarchic irruption into public life. This unexpected arrival is destroying the siege that the US Occupation has been preparing since 1915. By imposing their Jim Crow policies on us, crowned by structural adjustment programs, they are destroying our confinement. Like it or not, we are invading the capital it built for itself. Since it still doesn’t understand what “tout moun se moun” means, it doesn’t know where to run; while we are dying without understanding why we are killing ourselves.

1 The title is borrowed from Baron de Vastey’s masterpiece, Le Système Colonial Dévoilé. Cap-Henry: Chez Roux, the King’s printer, Oct. 1814.

2 Robert D. Taber, “Archives of the Revolution: Toward New Narratives of Haiti and the Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, v.75, n.3, July 2018, pp.541-550.

3 Charles Frostin, Les Révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIe et XVIIIe siècles (Haiti avant 1789). Paris: Éditions de L’École, 1975, p.70.

4 Jean Fouchard, Les Marrons de la liberté. Paris: Éditions l’École, 1972.

5 “Marrons” would be equivalent to “quilombolas” in Brazil.

6 The “small whites” (petits-blancs in the original text) were the white workers from lower classes.

7 Thomas Madiou observes: “The masses, being Black and enjoying all civil and political rights, were gaining ground everywhere and, with them, their customs, which were basically Guinean, were taking root. The mestizos, who made up a tenth of the population, were mostly almost identical to the Blacks in terms of customs, habits, and inspirations.” Histoire d’Haïti, t. v, 1822-1818. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1988, p.107.

8 This source of information is little explored from this angle and deserves more attention. The Creole language is a negotiating space where the fate of the nation and its re-entry into politics is at stake. Historical references are lacking. In addition, it is useful to observe the variations in the meaning of words when monolingual Creole speakers talk to each other and the differences that arise when exchanges take place between monolingual Creole speakers and French-Creole bilinguals. Given the traditional prestige of French, the meaning it gives to a word or expression tends to impose itself in the latter case.

9 Louverture, however, still thinks in terms of old and new freemen. The contract he institutionalizes is taken up in articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Dessalines (1805), article 1 of that of Christophe (1806), article 2 of that of Pétion, elected for four years (1807), and article 1 of the constitution establishing the presidency for life (1816). It is no longer to be found in the Constitution of 1843.

10 Charles Frostin, op. cit., p.167.

Of Humanity as Praxis Encounters in Three Fragments

Abena P.A. Busia

First Encounter: Excavating Estuaries

Along our landscapes

Thrive these spaces of contrasting encounters: Where oceans and rivers merge, Where sweet waters flow to embrace the salt.

The ocean is what, and the ocean is who we are: Fragments of creation, Water encased in thinking flesh longing to be free.

Particles of histories – deposited as barnacles or sea shells of the ages –

All of what lies beneath Slowly dissolving while Waiting to be reclaimed.

Particles of histories – deposited among decaying greenery and rocks for the ages –

All of what lies beneath Slowly marbelizing while Waiting to be unearthed.

Next Encounter: Layers of the Anthropocene

Encased water longing to be free Can become a dangerous Creative force:

Islands of flotsam lurking as insoluble scum on scenic waters while glaciers melt and lakes evaporate and mountain peaks slide to land and forests desiccate into deserts and thermally heated ocean floors decay.

Layers of ossified chokeable plastic signify the sedimented rock strata of our radioactive age; With such pollution, what remains to purify or preserve?

If humanity is a practice, we are playing Below par, If a verb, we be defective A non-conjugable form

Existing only in a present tense –Devoid of past, derelict of future, Derelict of past, devoid of future, Existing only, without sense –Harming and harmful.

Eternal Encounters: Celestial Mangroves

Yet like the cycles of the cosmos the silent soundscapes of the stars eternally with us, eternally us –Mangroves still fight to grow In those intertidal spheres Where oceans meet and leave the shore In roaring tidal waves of High and low returns, perpetually mutating.

The Milky Way is our Menstrual Body Breeding the gas and dust of stars, Bleeding our sunlight, directing our moon Which directs the movement of our oceans Which directs the flow of menstrual cycles Adjusting the movement of our lactations.

Some things move without our say-so Some things be without our know-so

Yet we have wordsmiths to turn eyewitness And visual artists as earwitnesses To other stories

To reclaim what we were –To transform the forgetting Into the embrace of who we are –To shed the now of what we are To sing what we may be Into being.

As we hear again the rippling of first waters Conjugating a new humanity.

The et and the Human Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil

Translated from Spanish

Traditions of thought are always changing, like Heraclitus’ river; yet they are (and are not) always the same river. These traditions take shape in multiple languages, each providing a semantic foundation from which threads of concepts, ideas, and analyses are woven across different cultures around the world. These traditions of thought may manifest as cultural practices, but this is not always the case. When I speak of or describe a concept from the Mixe tradition – the Indigenous people to which I belong – I do not mean that all cultural practices of all Mixe people are guided by those traditions.

For example, when I say that, in the Mixe tradition of thought, the notion of land as private property does not hold the same importance as it does in the Western tradition of thought today, this does not mean that every single Mixe person shares this perspective. The concept of land as private property – so fundamental in Western thought – may indeed shape the actual practices of some Mixe individuals. Clarifying this before outlining some ideas about humanity feels important to me because it prevents both generalization and, in many cases, romanticization of the Mixe cultural practices. It would be as if, when describing the values of Western democracy, one assumed that these values are perfectly reflected in the political practices of modern nation-states. This is not necessarily true, but it is also true that these values belong to that tradition of thought and shed light on various phenomena. With this clarification in mind, I would like to discuss aspects of the traditions of thought of Indigenous peoples, more specifically those of Mesoamerican peoples, and even more concretely, of the Mixe people, regarding the concept of the human. While in the West the humanist tradition enjoys widespread acceptance, in other traditions of thought the human takes on different characteristics. In many Indigenous traditions of thought, humanity is just one element within nature. The fundamental division between nature and culture (that is, between nature and humanity) in Western thought finds no direct equivalent in many Indigenous traditions of thought.

For example, during the performance of Mixe rituals –typically carried out in the mountains, caves, and other specific points in the territory – oral compositions can be heard that reflect how the human is positioned as part of a vast, complex, and continuous whole, something that in the Mixe language is called et.

This short word is both a verb and a noun. As a verb, it means “to be/exist;” as a noun, it could be translated as “everything that is/ everything that exists.” Allow me to use a metaphor: imagine reality as a single body, and humanity as a hand that has been abruptly severed. In Western thought, I can name nature as something separate from the human; the word et in Mixe still encompasses both. Rituals, often labeled as magical thinking in the West, are in fact evidence that, in the Mixe culture, humanity has not been entirely severed from what we call nature. Norma Palma Aguirre, from the Rarámuri people, expresses this clearly in an essay on the concept of territory:

For the Rarámuri, territory is not a separate space; we cannot say “us and the territory,” nor can we say “our territory.” We do not feel ownership over the space we live in; we do not possess it [...] we cannot say “from here to there is mine,” “this forest is mine,” or ‘this water is mine.” Even less can it be exchanged or sold. [...] We have been taught that we are part of this territory, that we are a unity.1

If, for Indigenous peoples, humans and the land form a single unit, then the violence inflicted upon the land is also suffered by the societies that inhabit it. The violence against land defenders is, in turn, an extension of violence against nature itself.

On the other hand, the division established in the West entails a cataclysmic act of primordial violence: it involves separating, severing, and tearing apart a continuum and creating the human world as an entity distinct from nature. Once the human has been excised from the natural world, everything outside culture and civilization is cast as a great Other – something that can then be subjugated, controlled, or dominated. Within this logic, common natural goods have been turned into private natural resources, and nature itself has become a commodity. Anything placed closer to the natural world within this tradition of thought is read as savage, primitive, and uncivilized. A major rationale behind the enslavement of the African peoples – who were forcibly taken to exploit the lands of this continent – involved placing these individuals on the side of nature; by being perceived as primitive, their oppression was considered entirely justifiable. The debate over whether the native population of this continent had a soul or not was, at

its core, a debate over whether to place them on the side of nature (alongside animals) or on the side of humanity (civilization).

Peoples across the world who have not made this initial separation between nature and humanity demonstrate, through their relationship with ecosystems, strategies that have resulted in most of the world’s natural reserves being located within their territories. It is no surprise, then, that Indigenous peoples’ natural resources remain one of the last spaces where the machinery that turns nature into merchandise has not yet fully penetrated. Nor is it surprising that corporations, States, or organized crime covet precisely these territories and the resources they hold – now that the rest of the planet has been devastated, they now seek what Indigenous peoples have safeguarded for centuries. The assault on Indigenous territories, now labeled as “natural reserves,” began intensively with European colonization, which was foundational to the rise of capitalism. Once European lands had been subjugated and exploited, the machinery that transforms nature into merchandise spread across the rest of the world. The main threat faced by Indigenous peoples today is this extractivist machine, which also takes the lives of those who attempt to halt its advance. The extractivist machinery, rooted in a tradition of thought that separates nature from humanity, has led us to the climate emergency that now looms as a harbinger of death, threatening life itself.

In response to the climate crisis, reactions vary. Some deny the phenomenon altogether to avoid jeopardizing extractivist machinery operations that fuel capitalist economic growth. Even among those who acknowledge the problem, there is no single stance. Eco-fascist positions have gone as far as proposing eliminating populations with high birth rates; while others argue that capitalism itself will develop technological solutions to the crisis; or that nuclear energy is the answer. Anything but challenging economic growth. On the other hand, some environmental movements rooted in European traditions do radically question the extractive machinery itself. However, these forms of environmentalism continue to center on a vision of nature as something separate from humanity. In keeping with their philosophical tradition, nature remains an Other – only now, it is an Other that must be protected.

From the perspective of Indigenous peoples, in line with their own traditions of thought, environmentalism could be described as the “defense of territory” – a territory that includes

humanity as just one more element within it. Perhaps for this reason, in conversations with Zapotec women defending their land, with women fighting for water or forests, they rarely describe themselves as environmentalists or ecologists. In many cases, their struggle is expressed in languages that do not make such distinctions, and their explanations often invoke other-than-human forces that also safeguard natural resources. They speak of angry lightning when forests are harmed, of guardian serpents watching over the springs, of non-human entities that sustain the lungs of the planet – lungs that now exist within the lands of those who have been labeled wild, savage, or primitive.

These contrasting worldviews – rooted in different traditions of thought about the relationship between humanity and nature – create spaces where translation is necessary. In legal advocacy, for instance, the understanding of what a threatened river means to a culture must be translated into legal language, into the discourse of positive law. The complex significance of water for a culture is translated, reduced, and condensed into the phrase “the human right to water,” to name just one example. Nature seems to matter only insofar as it is humanized. Indigenous peoples and land defenders have gone to great lengths to translate the significance of their struggle into the terms of positive law and Western logic. However, stopping violence against the land and its defenders also requires a journey back – healing the wound that has severed humanity from nature, mending the original rupture that justifies turning natural resources into commodities, and addressing the initial violence of having separated the land from ourselves. The climate emergency is making its demand loudly – it is a reminder of what capitalism has tried to obscure: that we are, and have always been, nature.

Aura Cumes, an anthropologist from the Kaqchikel people of Guatemala, emphasizes that in Western traditions of thought, “the human” has often been equated with “man.” It is no coincidence that, for a long time, the word “man” could be used interchangeably with “humanity.”2 Furthermore, in addition to being constructed as something separate from nature, the human was also defined through a gendered lens – a binary opposition that was itself hierarchized. In contrast, in Mixe traditions of thought, nouns do not mark gender, and it is impossible to infer it from words in isolation.

Humanistic traditions, which place humanity at the center, continue to uphold that original conceptual rupture that has separated us from everything else. What other practices might heal this fundamental wound? Is there a way to reintegrate humanity into the totality of existence and reality? The climate emergency could be read as a violent demand, a reminder.

The tradition of Nahuales (tso’ok in the Mixe language) opens up a range of possibilities – people can also be animals or what are known as forces of nature. This is not merely a magical vision of the world but rather the construction of a narrative universe that reinforces the idea of continuity between humans and other entities. A person with tso’ok can become lightning, a storm, or the wind, maintaining a will that flows through the different forms they take. What happens to the tso’ok also affects the person; if someone’s animal counterpart is a feline, the feline’s health will be reflected in the health of the person to whom it is linked.

The ancient system of name assignment is another example of how, in some traditions, what is seen as the humanity-nature divide in the West is instead understood as a continuum. A child would receive a name from the traditional Mixe calendar, which consisted of a number and the name of an animal, a plant, or a phenomenon such as an earthquake.

The humanity crisis, and of the traditions that place it at the center, lies in that initial conceptual rupture, in those boundaries that established man as the ruler of creation. Perhaps, even within this same Western tradition and in the face of today’s crises, we might find more answers in Eve than in Adam. Perhaps we must draw closer to the serpent once again, identify with it, recognize ourselves in it, and attempt to return to a primordial et – one that reminds us that humanity is, in the end, part of everything that is, of everything that exists.

1 Avaiable at: tzamtrecesemillas.org/sitio/territorio/. Accessed in: 2025.

2 Avaiable at: https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/ articles/8c6a441d-7b8a-4db5-a62f-98c71d32ae92/entrevistacon-aura-cumes-la-dualidad-complementaria-y-el-popol-vuj. Accessed in: 2025.

Us / Them

Rodney Saint-Éloi

Translated from French

Us The palm trees demand the sacrifice of the wind

The sea is a little boy pestered by the infinite

My fate lies on the slave ship

That speaks within me

The Ancestor from Gorée whose right arm was cut off

My face conceals the stiffness of fear

That’s where fear comes from

A fear that preceded me

Long ago

Long ago

Without my knowing

I am

Am I not

So where is the question

My body is the body of the offence

Ah, how I came to be one morning of unconsciousness

Came to be myself at the edge of a land called island

Because there is no water, precisely

Because there is no more land, precisely

This land yearns for the strong waters

Read my name on the wings of the butterfly

They named my people after their own first names

They named my cities after brothels

They named my winds at the whim of rivers

They enter my secrets without flinching

When I say honor

They aim their guns at the sleeping savannah

When I say honor

They turn their heads coldly

They gave us, gave They gave us the gift, they proclaim They gave us peace, they say They gave us the word, they say

The geography the morality and the beauty

They gave us the plantation and civilization

They gave us the whip the spittle the death

They have given us everything except the gift of choosing the piece of the sky that] we ourselves would have chosen as a feal in the language and in the poem that tell the beauty of our countries] They have given us everything except the gift of mourning our dead when our entrails are]

picked up by the multiplication of pains

They have given us everything except the right to name our dogs, our lovers, to choose the names we wanted to give our hills our rivers our flowers

We will never have the right to tears

We will never have the right to our cries

We will never have the right to our grave

They have given us what they have

They have given given given

The verb to give belongs to them

And the thing they give is their thing

We are two centuries of arches

We have the hand of humiliation and sin

We are two centuries of mourning flags

So we sing with hands crossed

So we dance with clumsy feet

They hit the sun

They hit the tree

They hit the bird

No one asked us to speak

No one heard our voices

No one gave impetus to our tongues

Silence germinated within us

It’s true that there are them

It’s true that there are us

Between them and us

The mountains divide destinies in two

But we know how to say us

We know how to love with love our loves

We have chromosomes

We have genomes

We have the proper size of brain

Our vices and our antics have fertilized the sciences

We have our share of sun

Our seas speak with rainbows

Our drums at night rain stars

We are standing on the boat of history

Oh, we live in the missed parentheses

Oh, what an erased history lesson

Who will one day tell us the winning number

Does the sun turn blind on the rivers

Does the moon light up the horizons the same way

We have our pan songs

We stand with our songs our mirrors

Who will write the history of this epic

And the compass the mangrove that founds the territory

Who will fix at our feet

The limits of the windward islands

Comrades, for two centuries

I’m crazy about the same madness

I’m crazy about the same history

I repeat the same words every night

I learn the verb to be

I raise my head

I raise my head

And I say to the four horizons

Honor

Who will tell me Respect

Walking Together Notes on Solidarity Beyond Empathy

Anna Roberta Goetz

In Otomi, still one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in Mexico, the word for “brother” has a number of complex connotations that reveal much about this rich culture’s thinking. Firstly, the word is not used as a noun but as a verb – a reflexive verb, to be precise. This means that saying “he is my brother” is really saying “we are brothering each other.” Also, this verb in Otomi has a homophone, that is, a word pronounced the same way but differing in meaning – in addition to describing a family relationship, it also means “to go,” or “to walk.” So when you say “he’s my brother” in Otomi, you are also saying “we walk together.”

I am repeatedly fascinated by how exploring languages allows an understanding of other ways of thinking and approaches to comprehending one’s role in the world and our relationships with people, animals, plants, or other beings. The Mixtec linguist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil has always broadened my horizons in this respect. This is the case in her essay for this publication,1 in which she discusses how the Mixtec term “et ” describes the human as part of a complex and continuous whole. And similarly to “brother” in Otomi, “et ” is both a verb and a noun and means both “to be,” in the sense of “to exist,” and “all that is/all that exists.” The distinction between nature and culture (i.e. between nature and humanity), which is characteristic of Western tradition, has no equivalent here, as in many other traditions of thought among Indigenous cultures worldwide. Humanity is understood as part of a larger whole in which everything that exists “brothers” each other and “walks together.” Humanity is considered a set of screws in a vast system in which everything potentially and mutually determines and impacts everything else.

We live in a time in which this systemic structure is more evident than ever. At the same time, there is a complete lack of awareness of it. Like never before, our societies’ spirit is characterized by individualism. Everyone focuses solely on their own well-being and acts accordingly, ignoring the far-reaching effects their own actions can have. The result, as we are currently experiencing, is a level of division, violence, and destruction not seen since the 20th century’s major wars. At the same time, there is more talk of solidarity in public discourse than, arguably, ever before. How does that go together?

In theory, expressing solidarity is a way of taking a stand toward understanding oneself as part of something bigger,

for which one takes co-responsibility. Group solidarity is often expressed by walking together – for example, in demonstrations. The term “solidarity” is usually seen as a synonym for the older concept of “fraternity” and is widely regarded – alongside freedom, equality, and justice – as a political and social fundamental value. Its conceptual roots go back to Roman law, in which the term obligatio in solidum was used to describe a form of obligation according to which each member of a community was liable for its debts and, conversely, the community was liable for the debts of each member. It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that the term was generalized and applied to the field of politics and society in general.2 It developed in the context of labor movements and is thus a genuinely modern concept – used, at various moments in the 20th century, in reference to social or moral relationships between individuals who are in principle equal to express support of groups seen as disadvantaged or oppressed. In the past decade, the term seems to have experienced a new boom. I would argue that social media has played a key role in this development. In any case, social media has ensured that expressions of solidarity have, in my opinion, degenerated into hollow phrases and thus become mere attention-grabbers: as long as nothing changes for those who are the object of this solidarity, it is merely empty rhetoric.

Currently, regarding the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, to name just two examples, it can even be observed that, in contrast to other protest movements in recent decades, a show of solidarity for one side or the other is literally demanded. And if you don’t comply with this demand, you are quickly labeled as a supporter of the respective opposing side. There is an extreme pressure not only to have an opinion, but also to express it publicly, which strangely enough seems to have an identity-forming effect. Especially in Germany, expressing an opinion on the Gaza war, for example, means running a gauntlet: it’s easy to be prejudged and dismissed by simplified definitions that are put forward by public institutions that claim to have the power to hold the sovereignty of interpretation over a singular definition.

I am not interested in discussing the war in Gaza or the related current messed-up culture of debate in the age of social media here. Nor am I interested in analyzing what the pronounced phenomenon of expressions of solidarity in social media can actually achieve. Rather, I would like to reflect on whether the visual

dissemination of the excesses of terror in all its forms, in images and figures – which aims to express solidarity by evoking viewer empathy for the victims of the suffering depicted – is in fact deeply unempathetic. Isn’t solidarity selfless by definition? Yet is the pressure to take sides in fact playing off the suffering of one group against the other, thus revealing an imbalance of power? The writer and art historian Aruna d’Souza suspects a politics in empathy, “one that allows the person called on to be empathetic to remain in a position of supremacy, doling out justice as a matter of kindness – or perhaps, pity.”3 Apart from the fact that I doubt that people expressing their grief and shock in the media can set anything in motion –such as pushing governments to question and halt financial support for a given party – this kind of expression of solidarity from the sofa, so to speak, which calls for empathy for those depicted, leaves me with a bitter aftertaste.

I can’t help but view such calls for empathy on social media as part of a medial self-presentation of being on the right side of history, rather than putting oneself at the service of protecting the human dignity of others, which is what one claims to be doing in the true sense. The neoliberal system that predominates in the societies we live in has conditioned us to put our own well-being above that of others and, in this sense, to put our own identity and brand first. We have created a media and political landscape in which triggering empathic reactions becomes the ideal tool to position and represent ourselves (and not the cause in question) politically, as it is aimed at individual change rather than collective action. In such a landscape, sufferers are ironically laden with the burden of presenting their suffering in the most spectacular way possible and sharing it with the world so that, firstly, it is ideal for reposting and, secondly, the representation of pain surpasses that of others. Empathy is thus stylized as a prerequisite for political solidarity and action.

Following common definitions of the term “empathy,” we speak of the cognitive ability to comprehend another person’s feelings, to resonate with their emotions as if they were our own, and to be willing to appropriately respond to the person’s needs. But how can we presume that we can ever fully see ourselves in another person, who lives in completely different circumstances, let alone that we can morally require others to empathize with another person’s experiences – especially when, as in social media posts, we

don’t even know the addressees? Isn’t this conviction based on the assumption of the comparability of one life with another, failing to take into account the diversity of lives and ways of being? As Aruna D’Souza asks, what if we based our politics not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness to care for them just by virtue of their being human beings?4 D’Souza advocates for thinking in solidarity beyond empathy. She believes that emotional identification with others as a prerequisite for solidarity fails to sufficiently build productive bridges for alliances. We thereby tend to avoid the task of facing up to the complexity of human action and allowing contradictions. Instead, she suggests that solidarity should be based on temporary, context-specific alliances that admit differences and sometimes ambiguities. It is about understanding each individual as being shaped by a multilayered network of circumstances. The actions and opinions of different people cannot be judged on the basis of the same logic. It is about recognizing the circumstances that lead to actions and opinions, even if you cannot and do not want to represent them yourself. In this sense, recognition is not the same as justification.

Let us remember, for example, the attack on the editorial staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, following the controversial publication of the so-called Muhammad cartoons. Firstly, Islam has a strong tradition of aniconism. Secondly, one infamous cartoon even showed the prophet with a bomb in his turban, reinforcing the stereotype of Islam as inherently linked to terrorism. Under the slogan “Je suis Charlie,” and in the spirit of defending freedom of expression, a movement of solidarity with the attack’s victims – the editorial staff – quickly spread in the media. The slogan invited people to identify themselves as part of this group; people who felt that their right to free expression had been violated. But who can claim unchallengeable and unlimited freedom of expression for themselves? This rhetoric is in line with what has often been used after many attacks in the Western world in recent decades, when people claim that “our” way of life has been offended and that “we” must defend it in solidarity. It is a political rhetoric that assigns values to lifestyles, and thus also to the groups of people who represent them: a ranking and a status within a society.

The “Je suis Charlie” solidarity movement was criticized for failing to acknowledge that not everyone in society is granted

the same freedom to express themselves. It was also pointed out that freedom of expression always ends where the dignity of another person is questioned or judged to be inferior, which clearly happened in this case. The cartoonists deliberately trampled on another community’s values in the name of satire, thereby placing themselves “above” this community. This example illustrates how social hierarchies can emerge and be reproduced when solidarity connects to emotional identification, and how complex the feeling of solidarity can be.

I am convinced that, walking together in the spirit of fraternity, we should be able to condemn the attackers’ violent acts and at the same time criticize the cartoonists. The end never justifies the means. Rather, we should be able to listen to and acknowledge the reasons that led to such an act, even if we cannot personally empathize with them. This case shows that when solidarity is combined with unconditional and uncritical empathy, the complexity of the circumstances is not recognized. D’Souza proposes a form of political solidarity based not on empathy but on a respect for opacity. She wants to consider a way of sitting with the unknowability of the other and still care for them, even without fully understanding or identifying with them; without translating ourselves into their terms.5

As thinking beings, our beliefs are the foundation of who we are and how we see ourselves. If this foundation is called into question in its existing form, the edifice built upon it can easily begin to totter – which, as we demonstrated in our Invocation at Guadeloupe, does not necessarily lead to a fall, but rather helps us to keep moving and strengthen our humanity. This second chapter of the Bienal’s public program was inspired by the theories of the choreographer and anthropologist Léna Blou, who, based on the Caribbean experience and the theoretical space that feeds on it, proposes to abandon thinking along supposedly fixed structures in favor of improvisation in the face of the opacity of the world in which we live.

In this sense, I am convinced that humanity’s fundamental challenge is to recognize and listen to other humans and ways of being, in the spirit of a mutual duty of care, even if we cannot identify with all differing traits. It is part of our basic responsibility to face up to this test throughout our lives and to keep questioning our own sense of self and the convictions associated with it to allow others

to take precedence, even if we do not share their convictions and cannot empathize with the motives driving them. It is an obligation to care for one another based on the humanity that connects us all at our core. Coming to terms with this task is part of the essential idea of understanding humanity as a practice. Like the concept of democracy, humanity is not something that can simply be postulated: it is only confirmed through our actions, in our dealings with and toward each other and all that surrounds us. A state is only truly democratic when it grants its citizens access to democratic principles and represents them in its institutions, and when its citizens consistently practice and defend them. In the same way, humanity means walking together and brothering each other, being human for and with each other, despite and in recognition of our differences, always, equally, as siblings bound by a sense of care.

1 See Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil’s essay on this volume.

2 Susanne Boshammer, “Solidarität,” in Stefan Gosepath et al (eds.), Handbuch der Politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008, pp.1197-1201. Available at: www.zora.uzh. ch/id/eprint/5616/1/HPPS_HPPSID_321.pdf. Accessed in: 2025.

3 Aruna D’Souza, Imperfect Solidarities. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024, p.30.

4 Ibid., p.81.

5 Ibid.

It is We Who Are the Function

Joshua Chambers-Letson

The crisis of our times is precisely that of the self-dissolution of this Age.

Sylvia Wynter

For the past several years I have taught Jamaican author, critic, and Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter’s influential 1984 essay “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism” at least once a year.1 The essay is as challenging as it is rewarding. I find that both the students and the teacher need time with the writing as it asks the reader to slow down and pay attention, moving carefully through the dense but ultimately generous and generative prose. Written in the grip of an extended crisis in the humanities – which Wynter described at the time as, among other things, “growing student defection to the vocational areas of education” – the essay situates this crisis within an “overall crisis of the episteme/organization of knowledge that was put in place […] in the nineteenth century.”2 This episteme, she suggests, is based on the “triad” of “biology, economics and philology/Literary Studies.”3

There is a relationship, Wynter argues throughout the essay, between the material basis of a society (the shape and forms that it takes) and the performative and epistemological means through which it knows and narrates itself. As she describes it, the emergence of the Studia Humanitatis in the Italian Renaissance staged an overthrow of the absolute theological episteme of the feudal order, positioning Man at the center where the Divine once stood and rewriting the world through a discourse of natural reason in the place where the divine will previously reigned supreme. According to Wynter, “it was such a rewriting of knowledge that constituted the founding heresy of the original Studia Humanitatis, seen in their broader sense as human knowledge of its sociohuman world, the heresy that laid the foundations of our modern rational world.”4 Wynter’s argument rests on a prescient diagnosis regarding the “overall crisis of the episteme/organization of knowledge”: “the crisis of our times is precisely that of the self-dissolution of this Age.”5

Part of what often surprises me and my students about Wynter’s argument is that it does not end with a disavowal of the humanities, even though it issues a trenchant critique of their destructive role in the colonial and racial ordering of our world. As Wynter

notes, even as the Studia overthrew theological absolutism, it still preserved, maintained, and reproduced several of the previous order’s features. This includes a series of foundational binaries such as the split between order and chaos or spirit and flesh. Indeed, the absolute order of the Divine, when replaced by the figure of reasoned Man, still presumed a universality which was often violently constituted through what Wynter calls the “overrepresentation of Man.” Here, the quite provincial figure of Man (European/white, male heterosexual, and landed) is defined as the universal representative of “the human.” As I have described elsewhere, because Man is constituted against its racial and colonial Other, this process reifies and reproduces a whole set of further founding oppositions:

Reasoned, natural Man (life/order/we-I) is posited against his Other – the unreasonable, unrational figure of death/ chaos/them. As the colonial orders of Europe establish themselves, this figure is racialized and represented as Black(ened) and Indigenous (the “Negro” and the “Native” [as well as the “Asiatic”]). This distinction provided the epistemological armature to justify the established orders of racial capitalism and colonialism and the subordination, subjection, and even genocidal destruction of Man’s many Others within these systems.6

The surprise of Wynter’s essay, then, is her insistence upon the Studia’s power to rewrite knowledge in a way that might still allow for a rewriting of the world through a new, heretical reinvention of the humanities.

In an era where, as Wynter prophetically observed,

even the self-correcting process of the natural sciences finds itself threatened by the increasing hegemony of a technoscience which seeks to manipulate the physical processes of nature in order to enhance the military and economic power of some human groups over others, a counter-exertion is called for parallel to that of the Studia’s original heresy.7

This counter-exertion, she suggests, might be realized not through an abolition of the Studia altogether, but rather through its own

heretical refashioning. The Studia must, in other words, “be reinvented as a higher order of human knowledge, able to provide an ‘outer view’ which takes the human rather than any one of its variations as Subject.”8 This “outer view” would need to be staged from within the Studia in part to ward off the reconstitution of a singular, privileged “variation” as universal “Subject.” And as an example of one such site from which this counter-exertion might be developed, Wynter offers “the view” from the marginal, hard-fought, and much-beleaguered site of Black Studies. She spatializes this via the example of a Black Culture Center located on the university campus where she works and established in the wake of global and local movements for Black life and Black freedom during the 1960s and 1970s:

Here the view from the Black Culture Center puts the emphasis on the new function of literature […]. The view from the Black Culture Center therefore insists, heretically, that far from “literature having no function,” as it is assumed, it is we who are the function. It is as specific modes of imagining subjects of the aesthetic orders which literature’s figuration-Word weaves in great feats of rhetorical engineering that we come to imagine/experience ourselves, our modes of being.9

Notably, it is not only the study of the humanistic vis-à-vis the literary that is at issue here. As “the view” from the Black Culture Center suggests, it is also literature’s – or the aesthetics’ – capacity to helps us reimagine and re-experience “ourselves [and] our modes of being.” If it was through the “Word” that the theological absolutism of the Christian ordering of the feudal world could be established, then it was also through the deployment of reasoned thought that the Studia Humanitatis could stage the heretical remaking of the world through its own narration of Man, literature, and poetics. In turn, humanistic inquiry aligned with the minor and engaging the aesthetic might still play an irruptive role in the reshaping of our many beleaguered and interconnected worlds. This is why Wynter insists “that far from ‘literature having no function,’ as it is assumed, it is we who are the function.”10

This is a sentiment expanded upon in Kandice Chuh’s 2019 book The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.” Engaging with Wynter’s thought, Chuh aims to “describe a

humanism different from bourgeois liberal humanism, and to suggest how and toward what ends the humanities might be organized around such an alternative and what work they might do.”11 The human is, once again, retained as part of the analytic here, though Chuh similarly deploys the figure toward heretical ends by aiming for “an understanding of human beingness to be defined not by discrete and self-possessed individuality but instead by constitutive relationality.”12 Aesthetics, and aesthetic practices that emerge especially from a minoritarian vantage, once more play a key role in this movement.

Through a reading of Monique Truong’s 2003 novel The Book of Salt – a rewriting of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ queer, literary love affair from the perspective of a queer, Vietnamese cook in their employ – Chuh tracks the degree to which Truong “give[s] aesthetic texture to colonial modernity and see[s] in it the ways that it fails to eradicate queerness, to discipline desire successfully, exhaustively, or, relatedly, to capture the underclass, the disidentified, the queer, the exiled,” as well as the racialized.13 In a fashion similar to “the view” taken from Wynter’s Black Culture Center, The Book of Salt engages in a “practice of creating sense and sensibility out of aesthetics, of understanding aesthetics as operating in, and issuing out of, other sensibilities, always relational, infinitely present. This is, finally, an illiberal humanist practice, one that is outward facing and open to difference, relation, the in-finite.”14 Chuh’s notion of an “illiberal humanistic practice,” like Wynter’s call for a new heresy, finds in aesthetics a power to rewrite “the human,” if not the very worlds that spring from humanity’s art of autopoetic self-narration.

I have returned our attention to Wynter’s and Chuh’s shared interest in a heretical humanism that might surface “after Man” as I attempt to form language from within our latest existential crisis. This is a crisis not just for the humanities but for the very form of “human beingness,” described by Chuh as a “constitutive relationality,” just as it is a crisis for the planet as the orders of Man have brought us to the brink of military and ecological self-annihilation. Wynter’s warning that “even the self-correcting process of the natural sciences finds itself threatened by the increasing hegemony of a technoscience” feels unnervingly acute in the present moment as tech oligarchs have taken a position of prominence in the US Presidential administration. This new regime openly flirts with and embraces White, Christian nationalism and imperial,

territorial ambitions while gutting environmental regulations and guiding a wrecking ball toward institutions of scientific and humanistic learning, in a process of wholesale resource redistribution upward. This frontal assault on the institutions of knowledge production follows the trajectory mapped by Wynter through a redistribution of resources in a fashion that will “enhance the military and economic power of some human groups over others.”15 It is notable, then, that this approach has been married to a retrenchment into the figure of Man through a virulent attack on the figure of the racialized or formerly colonized migrant via dehumanizing anti-immigrant laws, policies, and practices. Minoritarian spaces such as the Black Culture Center from which the “outer view” might be constituted are made even more precarious by vaguely defined interdictions against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). While “DEI” defines a largely corporate approach to the amelioration of racial stratification, official moves to ban the framework from public and private industry, as well as cultural and educational sectors, have expanded its definition to attempt the suppression and banning of art, literature, and criticism that acknowledge race and coloniality as salient social and historical factors, or that simply center on the stories of people of color and the colonized. Similar efforts to ban “gender ideology” (which is to say, the mere acknowledgement of the existence of trans and queer people, or of feminism) further underscore the stakes at play in the reactionary retrenchment of the Orders of Man.

When Wynter notes that “the crisis of our times is precisely that of the self-dissolution of this Age,” she offers an acute prophecy of the present moment as we witness the apparent and simultaneous unraveling of US empire as well as the attendant global political and military order established in the wake of World War II. We have also been witnessing “the self-dissolution of this Age” through a breakdown in meaning and knowledge accelerated by technology and social media to the benefit of a financial and tech class who now plays a direct role in the unraveling and remaking of the modern state. It is no wonder, then, that humanistic inquiry interested in the questions of race and racism, colonialism, gender, sexuality, ability and the other markers of social difference against which Man has been codified is under assault. If contemporary attacks on humanistic inquiry that takes the “outer view” suggest anything, it is that Chuh and Wynter are not exaggerating when they describe the

socially performative powers of the “heresy” posed by such “illiberal humanisms.” In other words, the effort to censor and dismantle the arts and humanities, especially those staged from a minoritarian vantage point, may not reflect their irrelevance so much as indicate a measure of their potential for success.

The humanities and the realm of aesthetics may have only weak powers in relation to the economic, political, and military arsenals yielded by this new global governing class. This ruling class, in turn, seems to gleefully herald the obsolescence of the “human” – whether this is achieved through the elevation of AI over people or the absolute shredding of any social and political deference to the already inadequate orders of “civil rights” and “human rights,” as witnessed in the genocidal destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank or in a slate of Western democracy’s mounting aggressions against people of color, immigrants, trans people, women, and the working poor. And, yet, the frontal assaults on minoritarian and humanistic knowledge production suggest their latent powers and their capacity to achieve, in Wynter’s words, the remaking and imagining of “ourselves [and] our modes of being.”16

To this end, our interest in “humanity as practice” may carry within it the seeds for transforming the world, allowing us to shape it into a place that is no longer hostile to, but potentially hospitable for, humanity’s continuance, sustenance, and survivance.

The success of the new fascist right in the United States, as elsewhere, rests precisely on the performative power of the Word. That is, it relies on the power of performance and autopoiesis to constitute reality against reason, just as it reshapes the world when lies are transformed into truth and confirmed knowledge is assailed as “fake news” and corrupt manipulation. The desire to destroy humanistic inquiry and censor aesthetics practices is not a struggle against the power of the epistemological or aesthetic to shape the world; it is a struggle to gain supremacy over these very powers. We must not relinquish our claim to their arts.

It is not only contemporary critics and philosophers who chart a path in this direction. Artists have long been at the vanguard of this struggle. I am reminded, then, of Yoko Ono’s 1962 essay “The Word of the Fabricator.”17 Denouncing her contemporary moment’s contempt for “any fictional act in the realm of consciousness,” Ono – like Wynter and Chuh – committed herself to the power of the Word and of fiction to reshape and remake the world:

If we assign the most fictional rules, only then, we may possibly transcend our consciousness. My current interest is in such a world of fictional rules, the laws of the fabricator: to ask ourselves to imagine a perfect circle and a perfect line which exist only in our conceptual world […] I know no other way but to present the structure of a drama which assumes fiction as fiction, that is, as fabricated truth.18

We must, on the one hand, resist the imposition of fascism’s “fabricated truth” over our reality, without, on the other, relinquishing the Studia’s heretical power “to imagine/experience ourselves, our modes of being” anew through the transformation of consciousness.19 In this way, we might find in the notion of “humanity as practice” a means to remake the world in the face of the one we currently inhabit. Our present world is increasingly aimed toward not just the obsolescence of the humanities, but the absolute destruction of human beingness that is defined by “constitutive relationality” and endlessly variable difference. The world we would dream into being, along the lines charted by Wynter, Chuh, and Ono, might stage reality otherwise.

1 Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2, v.12, no.3, spring-autumn 1984, p.20.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., p.21.

5 Ibid., p.20.

6 Joshua Chambers-Letson, “Towards a New Heresy: Sylvia Wynter’s ‘The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism’,” in Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World). Leipzig: Spector Books/ Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2023, p.31.

7 Sylvia Wynter, op. cit., p.56.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., p.50.

10 Ibid.

11 Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man”. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019, p.xi.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p.120. See also Monique Truong, The Book of Salt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

14 Kandice Chuh, op. cit., p.120.

15 Sylvia Wynter, op. cit., p.56.

16 Ibid., p.50.

17 Yoko Ono, “The Word of a Fabricator,” in Yes: Yoko Ono, eds. Reiko Tomii and Kathleen M. Friello. New York: Japan Society/ H.N. Abrams, 2000.

18 Ibid., p.285.

19 Sylvia Wynter, op. cit., p.50.

Radical Deviations Errancy as an Abolitionist Practice

Juliana Borges

Translated from Portuguese

ACT I – Paths That Are Not Roads

If not all travellers walk roads, can we assume that not every road is a path? Not every route must be followed; not every line must be drawn. Some paths do not fit on maps, while some routes survive in the memories of the bodies that have walked them, inscribed by the steps and struggles along the way. The world we live in is one of ground scarred by concrete as it attempts to prevent other paths from forming. From small cracks, whispers burst forth and become wandering cries seeking the movement of life. To err is to be alive.

The formal verb “to err” is semantically ambiguous. On one hand, it is used in its modern, intransitive sense to mean “to be mistaken” or “to do wrong.” On the other hand, it retains a more classical resonance, closer to the Latin “errare,” meaning “to stray,” “to wander,” or “to go astray.” This older nuance evokes the image of a subject deviating from a path, hesitating. Above all, to err suggests an action that the subject performs upon themselves.

Even in its ambiguity, to err assumes the dimension of refusal and movement – an act of resistance against restraint, normalization, and the imposition of a singular path. In the sense of contemporary wandering, to err is a practice of invention and reinvention. If humanity is a practice, then to err is a politics of gestures, affections, listening – and, above all, of doubt. Certainty has no place where error is possible. The anchor of certainty forecloses questions, fair exchange, and the opportunity of recognizing oneself in what is unfamiliar. To be a wayfarer is to defy the logic of control – a movement that transgresses fences, norms, and borders. It challenges the idea of humanity as a static noun and reimagines it as a verb.

Black people, Indigenous peoples, quilombolas, riverine communities, Romani populations, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and those living on the margins are routinely denied the right to move freely. They live under constant surveillance – whether by the state or by society. We cross the city as if walking through a minefield. The penal-police state targets, objectifies, and dictates where we are allowed to exist. Targeted ZIP codes. Targeted skin.

In this sense, to err is understood as a tension with the concept of respectability – a set of Western moral, aesthetic, and behavioral standards imposed on racialized groups, so they are tolerated in public. One of the main arguments for avoiding denunciations of

racism when black skin is associated with suspicion is culture and customs. This “suspiciousness” is constructed by and for gendered and racialized performances. Thus, a paradigm is established for how to speak, dress, behave, and occupy spaces. In this sense, to err is not just a fault; it is anything that deviates from the bourgeois, white, European standard. For Europeans, this occurs through the qualifications given to Latin, African, Arab, and Asian peoples. In the intranational dynamic, the paradigmatic reorganization of whiteness adapts and imposes the qualifications of non-being and error on racialized and subordinate groups under modern-colonial logic. When asserted by racialized bodies, to err breaks with demands for domestication and assimilation by refusing acceptances that require sacrifices of language, corporeality, and ancestry. Pretuguês is an example of errancy.

When developing the concept of Pretuguês, Lélia Gonzalez made it clear that the Portuguese language was influenced by the worldviews of the people on whom it was imposed. Thus, we can think of Pretuguês as an errancy that is not an error but a reinvention. It is a deviation that dismantles imposed myths of universality and denounces epistemicide. Often ridiculed and corrected, Pretuguês names what is invisible to the norm and creates loopholes in censorship. Therefore, erring is political – it asserts the right to movement. Erring is a declaration of the right to laughter and freedom.

In this text, I will exercise erring through displacement, a journey to think about humanity as a radical practice. Deviation as an ancestral technology of what is affirmed, as taught by Nego Bispo, the beginning, middle, and beginning. Who has the right to err? Who may lose themselves to find themselves again? The curve chosen before performance, choosing to stumble, pause, retreat, breathe, listen, and encounter. The refusal of incarceration and silence. Erring not as escape, but as the creation of abolitionist futures.

ACT II – Erring as Knowledge

I propose that we view error not as a stumble, but as a path. This is not a new idea, as the verb essentially means “wandering” or “being a wanderer.” It is also not innovative in philosophical and scientific thinking about error in the West, where it is absorbed and questioned. As Michel Pêcheux and João Flávio de Almeida have

pointed out, erring should not be understood as disorientation, but as movement. In a constant search for perfection and truth, it is error – or the act of seeking to avoid it – that leads to renovation, even though perfection may be unachievable. As it moves, the body that walks invents, reinvents, and rewrites territory; it listens and learns. By proposing an epistemology of erring, the authors present a form of knowledge grounded in their discussion of language, tongue, and discourse as dynamic, fluid, and ever-shifting – entities that transform as we move. Thinking is not merely the accumulation of truths – whatever those might be – but the confrontation of doubt, the stumbling over meanings, and the hesitation over words.

Thus, Afro-Indigenous knowledge emerges as a pedagogy of movement, a beginning-middle-beginning. These cosmologies are not organized in a rigid or linear fashion, which does not imply chaos or disorder, but rather another form of order. They are organized in a circular fashion. This knowledge moves with time and the earth under the perception that the world is not external but a living organism with whom one can talk, dance, and exchange. In this context, erring is not a deviation but part of the journey. In anthropology, Amerindian perspectivism offers an alternative approach to knowledge by encouraging us to understand others from their own perspectives rather than from our own. The human then becomes a perspective rather than a paradigmatic essence. Therefore, we can understand knowledge not as mastery, but as a transition between ways of seeing and being seen. With this understanding, the monopoly of knowledge is shattered, and it is seen as distributed among all beings. Scholars such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Tania Stolze, and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha offer this radical inversion in our understanding of knowledge.

In addition to errancy, displacement does not lose its center because it rejects the concept of a fixed center. These are evolving forms of knowledge. Error is not something that needs to be eradicated; rather, it is the possibility of a new beginning – a beginning-middle-beginning. Time is not linear but spiral because it revolves around many origins and futures rather than around itself. In this sense, wandering and quilombo converge. A quilombo embodies the refusal to see error as failure and instead affirms deviation as a legitimate path – a way of life and a political stance.

Historian and intellectual Beatriz Nascimento, along with other Black intellectuals such as Abdias do Nascimento and Clóvis

Moura, affirmed the quilombo as not only a geographical space, but also a temporality and an alternative form of social organization and technology of existence. Born out of forced displacement, it transformed into a re-foundation. It is an alternative form of organization because it questions the colonial state model that had been in place until then. It creates and recreates itself in the face of kidnapping and persecution. The physical quilombo was an affront to the colonial project because it deviated from the concepts of property and linearity while proposing community and shared ancestry as the future. It was not just about escaping but also about founding, loving, knowing, and living differently: living without an owner, without captivity, and without imprisonment; deviating toward freedom. Erring is the radical dignity of the route outside of official history, rewriting freedom with Black and Indigenous hands. Erring as living life.

In this context, disobedience is not a moral failing but a conscious choice to walk away from the path of domination. The quilombo became more than just a destination; it became a journey and a new horizon. It was transformed into a traveling pedagogy that reinvents the world.

ACT III – Narrating Oneself Outside Prescribed Routes

How can we think about erring as a practice within the context of human dynamics without engaging in dialogue with a fundamentally human creation such as literature? Through various literary characters, we can analyze the incorporation of wandering as destiny, condition, and reconstruction. Error is not merely an event in a literary plot; it is integral to the plausible depiction of the world.

Jorge Amado’s character Quincas Berro Dágua, abandons bourgeois respectability and wanders the underground, refusing to perform the role assigned to him. Through this journey, he reinvents himself and the meaning of freedom. To some, this is a mistake; to Quincas, it is salvation. Riobaldo, a character from Grande Sertão: Veredas by Guimarães Rosa, is defined by doubt and an existential journey through life’s tensions. He walks, recounts, and loses himself. In this movement, he constructs meaning. Returning to classical tradition, we find the Homeric character of the Odyssey : Ulysses to some and Odysseus to me due to the fastidiousness of those who have studied classical literature. He is a wanderer par

excellence. Odysseus did not return to Ithaca after the Trojan War just to reunite with his beloved Penelope; he returned because of destiny. Nevertheless, his journey home takes years and is marked by detours, delays, and enchantments. Each of Odysseus’s “mistakes” becomes a story.

Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma eludes the classical hero profile, but his trajectory is marked by contradictions and subversions. Perhaps he is the character who best embodies, in Brazilian literature, the notion of the character-as-errancy. However, we also find Macabéa, in Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star. Unlike Macunaíma, Lispector’s character reveals an errancy that is almost erasure, but which rises in strength in the face of opacity. In the literature of Conceição Evaristo, errancy emerges in the narrated lives of bodies and characters who dialogue with lives historically deprived of the right to err. There are figures, such as Ponciá Vicêncio and so many others in Becos da Memória, who walk, resist, reconstitute journeys, and redraw territories of affection. Erring arises in everyday life to recreate what seems forbidden and prohibited.

We can also encounter an errant figure in Shug Avery from The Color Purple by Alice Walker. For Shug, wandering represents a desire for freedom and life. The consequences of this choice are significant – scandal, gossip, and social judgment. Nevertheless, Shug persists in her errancy as a form of liberation, asserting the right to live where and how she chooses. Her choices ultimately lead to the process of rebirth and the restoration of meaningful relationships.

The Beat Generation is a symbol of US literary counterculture and another example of errancy as rebellion and quest. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the road is not only physical but also metaphorical, representing a journey of meanings. Is it a search for humanity as a practice? It is a rejection of conformity and moralism, a form of writing in motion that explores the improvisation referenced in jazz. For other icons of the movement, such as Diane di Prima, errancy and exploration confront ideas of womanhood, motherhood, and activism. Errancy becomes a form of existential and formal disobedience, reinventing what is possible. I could mention several other characters. Literature is important in discussions about humanity because it shows us that making mistakes is human because it is an act of creation. Characters may stray from the path not because of weakness, but because of choices, destiny, or vocation. The straight path is an

illusion; there is wisdom in stumbling. Sociologist and literary critic Antonio Candido affirmed literature as a fundamental human right because it allows us to “exercise our condition as subjects.” Verisimilitude, a literary technique, allows fiction to reveal truths deeper than immediate reality. It sustains literature as a space for the unspeakable and makes lived experiences believable, especially for those whose histories have been silenced. Erring, as a narrative and political gesture, is also insisting on writing worlds that escape their predetermined fate. It makes life a journey that never ends because it begins and begins again without ceasing.

ACT IV – Prison and Dehumanization: The Imprisonment and Death of Movement

Prison is the most brutal form of architecture that denies errancy. If erring means to walk, think, desire, and transform, then prison arrests time and corrodes the body. It functions as a colonial-modern apparatus that punishes not only specific acts but also extinguishes any possibility of movement. It impacts communities and opens social wounds with no intention of healing them. The prison system, the prison-industrial complex, and the public security apparatus are constantly growing and have little to do with crime prevention or violence reduction. They operate as instruments of social, racial, and territorial control. They contain historically marginalized populations, maintain structures of inequality, and sustain a logic of profit and exclusion based on the punishment and surveillance of bodies considered disposable. That is why I ask myself: Who can move? Who can err? Who can dream? And who can live?

As a human practice, errancy is denied to racialized, marginalized, and dissident bodies. Movement can be life-threatening and mean the end of “freedom,” or the idea of it, since it is constantly monitored and controlled. Prison is where the state abandons any pretense of recognition. It is the death of movement, listening, and subjectivity. It is a non-place of humanity.

The prison system is no exception; it is one of the triumphant faces of the colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and racial project. Its function is to manage racialized populations who are considered disposable. Prison produces silence, erases memories, and, more importantly and dangerously, produces a pedagogy of fear. Attempting to discipline and correct guilt, which is often more in-

grained than the actual offense, shapes the subject through violence rather than care, accountability, and collective reparation.

Penal abolitionism, particularly in its Black form, is urgent and necessary. It is a rebellious journey that rejects the paths imposed by colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Instead, it proposes deviation as the creation of new paths of justice, care, and freedom. This is a radical practice of humanity that advances by breaking down walls. Prison is revealed not as a failure of the system but as the system in full operation. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a thinker and penal abolitionist, proposes an “abolition geography,” where territories and communities are not mapped by fear, punishment, and control but by bonds of solidarity, networks of care, reparation, and collective justice. Instead of prisons, there would be schools. Instead of policing, there would be listening. Instead of punishment, there would be accountability and transformation. In this possible space, abolition becomes a horizon, a practice, and a promise. It is unavoidable in the face of barbarism. Penal abolitionism radically affirms humanity as a practice and a collective exercise in rebuilding life. Criticizing punitivism is also committing to love as a political practice. As bell hooks reminds us, it is an exercise in listening, restoration, and accountability without the need for punishment. No being can be fully human if they cannot move. Therefore, penal abolitionism is the rejection of a world that punishes to build and sustain a world that cares.

ACT V – Freedom as a Verb: Reimagining Living –“We Are Beginning, Middle, and Beginning”

For those who have been prevented from walking and erring, freedom cannot merely be a noun. It must be affirmed in practice, together with humanity. Freedom is not a destination, but a journey – a constant movement to create worlds that reject dehumanizing structures. By affirming freedom as an ongoing struggle, Angela Davis challenges the liberal notion of freedom as limited to individual rights that materialize in a selective, racialized, and commodified manner. Classical conceptions founded on individualism are fierce traps for bodies who experienced kidnapping and captivity and who now experience imprisonment and gunpowder within the logic of capital and the nation-state. For Davis, exercising freedom presupposes structural transformations that break with inequality, incarceration, and poverty. Freedom is a process and a movement.

Antônio Bispo dos Santos, a writer, poet, philosopher, and quilombola leader who is better known as Nego Bispo, stated that “we are the beginning, middle, and beginning.” Like a spiral of return and advancement, deviation and reinvention. In this sense, freedom is not the end of the road but what is built with each step taken off it. Therefore, freedom must be practiced in territories that resist punitive logic and in abolitionist zones where care replaces punishment and life is valued more than the norm. These are terreiros, urban quilombos, occupations, peripheral collectives, restorative justice projects, and mothers fighting for memory and truth.

In this exercise, listening is at the center, allowing the other person to exist without justification. According to communication expert, artistic director, and poet Lua Leça, listening is no longer passive, but active and serves as a tool for reconstruction. Active listening forms the foundation of any justice system that aims to be fair, restorative, and transformative.

None of these paths is easy. Reaffirming humanity and exercising it, disputing the meanings and directions of freedom, and claiming error as a path to emancipation are not easy tasks. Recognition, accountability, reparation, and reconciliation require allowing for error along the way. Error should not be seen as a flaw to be eradicated, but rather as part of the movement toward growth, coexistence, and rebuilding social fabrics. The first step is recognizing that erring is part of being human. Reimagining humanity and the world demands a reimagining of freedom and justice. This means understanding that there is a continuous process of construction and becoming, shaped not by straight lines, but by multiple, unfolding horizons.

ACT VI

Invention of Other Worlds

Humanity as Practice

Errancy enables encounter. When the world enforces obedience, straight lines, and colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist-racial discipline, it is through deviation that we rediscover the other and ourselves. Remember that one meaning of “to err” is “to lose oneself within oneself.” This requires hope and a path off the beaten track. Through this refusal and errancy, humanity can finally embody a daily gesture of other existences, affection, and recreation.

In All About Love, bell hooks presents love as a political concept that requires responsibility, commitment, and action. It is a practice based on relationships. In times of barbarism and destruction, practicing love and humanity means insisting that life matters and is worth living, Fernanda Torres. It means affirming the collective possibility of happiness and good living and sharing community paths. This involves breaking with the logic of competition and individualism, which does not negate individuality, and allowing life to pulse in the spaces between, in the common. Community then becomes more than a place; it becomes a reinvented technology of ancestral care.

Errancy becomes vital. Disobedience becomes its driving force when laws are organized to destroy. Disobeying colonial normality, punishment as justice, and loneliness as destiny. By erring, one creates another possible order that paves the way for care, listening, and reparation. In this process, a freedom that excludes error is soon perceived as disguised imprisonment. Routes and detours cultivate joy in absence by practicing everyday humanity. In anthropophagic dialogue, error becomes a critical digestive gesture. Wandering allies itself with anthropophagy to build a pluralistic path where culture is not merely consumption but a way of life.

Errancy is the movement of those who dare to live beyond what is permitted and glimpse more than what is possible. It cries out: “WE

ARE THE BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND BEGINNING.”

We are the step outside the line. We are the ones who stray to live. We produce food while mothers hold on to memories that reaffirm life.

If Humanity Is a Verb, Then It

Is

to Walk

Jacques Attali with Alya Sebti and Bonaventure Soh

Bejeng Ndikung

Conversation held in March 2025

Translated from French

BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG

NDIKUNG: About fifteen years ago, I came across your book Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), and something really struck me. As someone who works with visual arts, as a curator, you encourage us to listen rather than look, and that has been a great source of inspiration. When I was invited to curate the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, I proposed the idea of Humanity as Practice in reaction to everything that is happening in the world.

Part of the title of this Bienal is Not All Travellers Walk Roads. These are lines from the poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence], by the writer Conceição Evaristo. Reflecting on humanity and its prospects is a second element that drew me to your work. In many publications, you talk about humanity, history, and the future of humanity. If the paths that humanity has taken so far have brought us here, what other paths can we follow?

You write that we learn history and draw lessons for our future. We wanted to talk to you. To talk about humanity, the importance of sound in our time, to talk about governance.

ALYA SEBTI: The story that brought me to you was when I read La Confrérie des éveillés [The Brotherhood of the Awakened] (2004) as a teenager. It really moved me, because it was at a time when I was questioning different religions and the divisions that their exploitation can lead to. It has been fundamental in helping me understand many things, including how important philosophy is today. Perhaps one of the questions is how we can remain relevant, how we can find the right path for a Bienal that aims to go beyond borders, beyond nationalities, overcoming identity barriers, proposing a vision of practices or proposed practices of humanity. How can art and beauty enable this?

JACQUES

ATTALI: There is a concept that occupies my mind a lot at the moment, perhaps because it is the theme of my next book, and one that could be useful to you right now: the concept of gratitude. I believe in gratitude for life, for others, for nature, for our roots, culture, art, and artists, for ourselves, and for our own bodies.

Firstly, neuroscience now shows that feeling gratitude is a factor in happiness and well-being, and that there is an extraordinary reciprocity in it... The feeling is the same when we are grateful and when we do something that makes someone else grateful. Someone does something for me, I feel grateful and that causes a feeling in them as well. Meanwhile, when I do something for someone, it’s the same in cellular neuroscience.

So, to put yourself in a state of what is called positive psychology, or gratitude, without forcing it, there are many things that today make people say that you need to write a gratitude journal every day, but I think it is always useful to remember what you should say to your parents, friends, and adversaries, who have contributed a lot by being adversaries, fueled by their enmity, and what we owe to others is very, very important.

I think this creates a feeling of fulfillment right from the start for the Bienal, because you have to feel gratitude and recognition at the same time, because gratitude is what I feel, and recognition is the fact that I recognize that I need to do something for others, and that is therefore action. This recognition can also be accompanied, in certain circumstances, by a duty of ingratitude, of escaping a familiar environment, the rules that have been established; an artist can only be ungrateful to his masters because he must escape them. Therefore, it is this dialectic that I think could be useful to you. It could also be full of gratitude, and this is complicated as a concept, with regard to future generations, because we need them, not least because when we are old we will need them, this is for us; these are reports of what is happening today in countries where the birth rate is falling and countries are disappearing.

BSBN: Can you believe we’ve reached this point in the world, when we look at what’s happening in the United States with the deportation of immigrants? Have we gotten here because we’re ungrateful? Why is humanity so self-absorbed? Are we capable of practicing gratitude?

JA: In reality, a very common trait among humans is that we hate owing something to someone else. As soon as we owe someone something, we find a reason to hate them so that we don’t owe them anything, so that we are not indebted to them.

If someone has done you a favor, this becomes intolerable. You have to hate that person. This is also the source of anti-Semitism and the relationship with migrants. Not because we need them. This goes far back. For example, in the Roman army, soldiers whose lives were saved by another soldier would immediately become angry with the one who saved them so as to not have to do the same thing.

Therefore, ingratitude is a natural counterpart for generosity. A civilization is one that transcends this and recognizes the importance of gratitude and the barbarity of ingratitude. I think this is a very important theme. We must be grateful to nature. We talk about the gratitude we owe to our ancestors, to nature, to animals. The fact that we are only passing through, that we are only tenants of space, that we give it back to others. This is a theme that I consider useful for you because it is very structuring.

BSBN: For this Bienal, Not All Travellers Walk Roads, we want to learn from participants how they use their art to shape humanity. Really, every day, when we wake up, we should ask ourselves: If humanity were a verb, how would we conjugate it?

JA: I would say “to walk.” First, because humanity has been on the move for 300,000 years, and this sedentary lifestyle began 10,000 years ago, and it closes in on itself, it stops. Sedentarism is a parenthesis. Everything important that has been done on the planet, in humanity, has been done through walking. First, because Greek philosophers walked and different peoples walk. And it is in walking that humanity created itself, it is in walking that humanity found its origin, its identity: it walks. It is in fact the only living species that walks. Therefore, the very nature of humanity is to walk. When humanity stops, it is because it is locked up, imprisoned. There is a beautiful Japanese haiku that says: “When you are traveling, think of home; when you are home, think of traveling.” This means that when you are home, you have to welcome travelers, because you were once a traveler and want to be one again, so you have to welcome them as if you were the traveler. When you are a traveler, think about home. This means that when you are a traveler, think about the people at home. You have to behave well toward them so that they will welcome you,

because when you are home, you want those who come to you to behave well. I think this is a haiku about everything.

BSBN: In fact, right now, at my institution in Berlin (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), we have an exhibition called Moussafiri. The word Moussafiri comes from Arabic, but it is the same word in Swahili, Romanian, and Urdu, and it means both traveler and guest. We are departing, but we are also somewhere. Furthermore, it is also important to know that the word hôte refers to hostile. The hôte [host] is the one who receives and the one who is received. That is why Jacques Derrida speaks of hospitality. And hostile is the enemy. Therefore, we must always bear in mind that the other is a threat if we do not find ourselves in a state of gratitude, of kindness, which is an extraordinary quality.

AS: In relation to your concept of gratitude, I make a connection with the second fragment of the Bienal’s concept. It is recognizing the importance that others have in our construction. We only exist if we are together. That is why Bonaventure quotes René Depestre’s verses in “Une Conscience en fleur pour autrui” [A Blossoming Conscience for Others] in the text of the curatorial concept: “My joy is knowing that you are me/ and that I am deeply you.” Because I see myself in you and you see yourself in me.

JA: This is the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. On the importance of others in defining one’s identity. This is why, incidentally, the solitary traveler is condemned to death. He never gets away when he travels alone. The human condition is defined by travel. Continuing to walk is also a curse.

BSBN: In Cameroon, and throughout Central and West Africa, they say that if we want to leave quickly, we go alone, but if we want to go far, we go together. To go far, we think alongside the community. This is important.

JA: Nomadism. I am writing a history of nomadism, and I believe it is fundamental to our societies. Whether it is real nomadism or

what we are experiencing today, which is virtual nomadism. People who enjoy video games practice nomadism, but virtual nomadism. There are many people who are virtual nomads. In fact, there are three categories of people. Those who have ample resources and can travel freely as they wish. There are between 3 billion and 4 billion very poor people who are nomads from the countryside to the city, from city to city, and then to another country. And, in between, there are people who dream of being nomads of struggle, who tremble at the idea of joining the nomads of misery and who drown themselves in the virtual nomadism of video games. That is humanity. We walk or pretend to walk, but we seek. Since we were expelled from paradise, we have found this in many civilizations. In Ethiopia and in Hindu civilizations, there is the idea of a man who was expelled from somewhere and who walks, and that walking is his curse, but at the same time, it is what he experiences. It is what makes him find new things, invent, discover. It is what makes him himself.

AS: One of your books refers to the figure of the hypernomad as a possible way of repairing or reinventing forms of humanity that place hope, listening, and empathy at the center. How exactly does that work for you? How can we imagine this individual, these hypernomadic initiatives in a world like today’s? And strengthen them to make them more capable of resisting and inventing their own definition?

JA: I don’t know... It will probably come after a major catastrophe that will make us realize we can’t go on like this. That major catastrophe could happen and cause everyone to change, or it could cause some people to change in some places. I can easily imagine islands of nonviolent radicalism that will propose different lifestyles and that will gradually be crushed by the system or will come together to create another system. That’s how I see it.

BSBN: Can it start with artists?

JA: Artists are part of it. Collectively, yes, they are part of it. In particular, conceptual art, in my opinion, is very important in this regard because it is an art form and an explicit way of thinking.

BSBN: I wanted to bring back sound and music. For this edition of the Bienal, we thought a lot about a musical direction that emerged in Recife in the 1990s called manguebit, created in reaction to the neoliberal changes that destroyed the city. They created a manifesto called “Caranguejos com cérebro” [Crabs with Brains], where they talked about rethinking society through sound. I wanted to go back to what you wrote about sound, “Music as a possibility of fashioning the world.” Creating societies with music.

JA: Music is an extraordinary art form because it is an art of signs that requires nothing more than the voice or thought and can therefore explore the field of possibilities much more quickly than all other formats. Music, mathematics, and finance are three areas that are purely abstract and can advance very quickly. We are making progress in society.

Today, we have mathematics that is light years ahead of what humanity needs to move forward. We have financial instruments that are far ahead and very dangerous, very powerful, much more than humanity needs, and music itself explores the field of possibilities. By exploring the field of possibilities, it sees in advance what others may see later – if we want to hear it in all its forms – it always tells us that it is noise, that they are artists. What I seek most is the moment when, in absolute catastrophe, people will either lock themselves away as narcissists to listen only to their own music, or they will listen to their own music to exchange and create with others.

That’s why I attach great importance to what happens to musical instruments. I think it’s very important to see musical instruments appear and develop, because it means that I take ownership of music, not just listen to it, and if I make it myself for myself, that’s also a form of confinement; if I make it myself to post on Instagram or TikTok, that’s narcissism; if I make it myself as a plea to others to come and make music with me, to make world music, then somehow we’ll have something.

I am always very interested in seeing new forms of music that are the result of sharing, of mixing different types of music, and today I feel that this is working. There was a time, not so long ago, when I was very concerned about all the forms of narcissism

in music: when we listen alone, we do everything just for ourselves, we play only for ourselves; we write ourselves or simply perform for the sake of spectacle. I see this resurfacing, and it gives me a very important signal about bands and orchestras. And this is the new form, this is the rebirth of voluntary civilization: we come together voluntarily. That’s why music is so seismically interesting. In Brazil, we see many people making music together.

AS: Music and dance inform our understanding of Humanity as Practice. At this Bienal, we have four educational publications that dialogue with the Invocations. We held the first Invocation in Marrakech around “deep listening and active reception,” in addition to breathing. The second was in Guadeloupe, around a dance movement called Bigidi, which is both a step in which we allow ourselves to falter but not fall, and a philosophical concept. The third was in Zanzibar on Taarab and improvisation, so we had a conference with Taarab musicians, Taarab theorists, and this confluence. The next one will be in Tokyo on the issue of technology and humanity.

BSBN: Perhaps that is precisely our next question about the technology of our time and the future of humanity, considering all these technologies because, as you said, speech can become a lethal weapon when used as slander; if there is no balance, the exchange can become frustrating and therefore dangerous. If we look at what happened between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the discourse was so violent that it became a weapon, but what is happening on social media is this one-way discourse. I was thinking about this when you were talking about orchestras, because creating orchestras is also creating opportunities to listen. And there is no listening.

AS: How can you imagine a form of humanity where current technologies tend to be more fragmented or something where there is no empathy, where there is no listening? How do you imagine a possible humanity with technologies that accompany this empathetic way of understanding humanity?

JA: These technologies are reversible; they can be used for good or for evil, so they can be used altruistically, empathetically, to express gratitude for collaboration, to invent new things, to overcome them; it is a question of people’s will, and will, in my opinion, comes more from fear than anything else. There needs to be fear of disasters for people to react.

Sometimes I think of Karl Marx, who in the end was asked by the German socialists to give his opinion on their first program for the first congress of the German Socialist Party, which was to take place in Gotha, Germany, and he wrote a text called “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1891). It’s a very difficult text; basically he says that they haven’t understood anything and that socialism can’t be in one country, it must be global, that’s what we must do. And mysteriously he ended this text with some words in Latin, because he spoke Latin very well: Dixi et Salvavi animam meam, which means something like “I have spoken to save my soul, and I don’t believe what I’m saying at all...”

I didn’t want to get to this point, but sometimes I start thinking about it and end up saying that it’s true that he understood that to socialize in just one country would be a disaster. He had seen this happen in Russia, but anyway.

AS: Do you still have a glimmer of hope?

JA: Yes. You know, I often use Brazil as an example: it’s like a soccer match. If you’re watching the game and you’re a fan of one team, you can be optimistic or pessimistic: we’re going to lose, we’re going to win. But if you’re a player on the field, it doesn’t make sense to be optimistic or pessimistic, you have to win, and to win you have to be in good shape, your teammates have to be in good shape, work together to define a strategy, know your opponent’s strategy, and implement that strategy. My point is that there is no point in being optimistic or pessimistic, we have to win the game. The only thing I can say for today is that we are at halftime and the score is 2-0 and we are the team in the lead.

BSBN and AS: It’s Le cantique des oiseaux [The Song of Birds].

JA: That’s true. Why did you think of Le cantique des oiseaux?

AS: Because we were just talking about this with an artist who will be working, among other things, with Le cantique des oiseaux as a reference in his own work. Like your example of a soccer game, at the end of their journey, it is themselves that the birds encounter.

BSBN: You mentioned music, mathematics, and finance. I would like to hear more about your perspective on finance, especially in the contemporary context with someone like Elon Musk, who is almost president, who manages finances, but also in the context of the economy, where we have a taxation system that the United States is imposing on the European Union, Mexico, and Canada, among others.

JA: It is a question that has always been found throughout history: cooperation or conflict between powerful people and rich people. And, in general, powerful people win when they have time to sell, otherwise rich people win because they always have time to sell, but things usually end badly. Today, Musk embodies the power of the market, the power of finance, which is by nature stateless – at the moment he looks after the United States, but he himself is a planetary figure: Starlink is planetary, SpaceX is planetary, Tesla is planetary, while Trump is someone who, in principle, has only four years and is limited to the United States, so there is potentially a conflict between the two, their interests are not aligned. For now, finance is at the service of political power, but that will not last.

Is nationhood important today? Because, if we think about the financial context, there are things that are more important and more powerful than nations. If we take Tesla as an example, nationhood can only be important if you have the means of power, that is, the army, the police, and the ability to close borders, and that is what Trump is doing. If we close them, this gives the nation-state a power that it normally no longer has, because the world market destroys nations, destroys states – not nations, but destroys states. So Trump is a reactionary who is trying to put power back where it normally is; the Russians are doing the same, they absolutely want to keep power; the Chinese are doing the same, they refuse openness. But openness is natural, they won’t be able to stop migrants, because they can’t stop the movement of capital,

even if they can slow it down a little from time to time, because it’s more powerful.

Humanity has made its choice. It could have chosen something else, but it chose freedom as the supreme value. It could have chosen equality and it could have chosen fraternity, but it chose freedom, and that choice means freedom of movement, no borders, and no matter what Trump tries to do to stop it with customs tariffs and barriers to migrants, it won’t work, except to temporarily establish dictatorships like the Russians or the Chinese. We will have the same problem in Africa because Africa has 1.5 billion inhabitants, that will be 2.5 billion, it will be almost 4 billion by the end of the century. It is gigantic and uncontrollable, so there too, states will not be able to sustain themselves.

Unless we can imagine cities that are managed intelligently, I think cities – if we are looking for urban utopias – are very interesting. There are cities that are models of quality of life and are even beginning to isolate themselves as such. The most successful cities today are Oslo, Zurich, and Helsinki.

AS: So these are the islands of resistance you mentioned at the beginning of this interview.

BSBN: But instead of thinking about the micro, the macro, such as the European Union, will not work, it is the last chance for the macro, and it has to work, otherwise it will be total chaos. It can work, Trump is helping us by withdrawing from Europe.

AS: In fact, not long ago you published an editorial on this issue of European Union, particularly through the use of force to defend Europe, and in a way this kind of last chance. There is also the time factor, in that the timelines are very slow compared to the urgency of the situation, but there is also a situation, experienced somewhat passively in Germany, where we have the impression that rearmament or protection is being carried out at the expense of other budgets, whether culture or education.

JA: But Germany has sufficient leeway to increase its defense budget without reducing its culture budget.

BSBN: Yet they do so. In fact, the first budget they cut is culture. And then there is the question of Zeitenwende, the temporal shift, the paradigm shift advocated by Olaf Scholz, former German chancellor. We wondered what this Zeitenwende is; you also wrote that when two powers clash, a third wins. Who is winning now?

JA: China, temporarily.

BSBN: And where does Saudi Arabia stand in all this? Where is peace in the Middle East now? Is it being negotiated in Saudi Arabia, just like peace in Ukraine with Russia?

JA: Saudi Arabia is becoming the central nation of the Middle East and sees itself as a power with the entire region – a modern Iran, Israel, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gulf countries – more powerful than Europe. And it has the means to do so, because the center of the world is shifting and the Indian Ocean will be the center of the world. So it has enormous potential strength. There you go. Have we answered all your questions?

BSBN: One last question: you have predicted the future of humanity from our point of view and given us a recipe for how to predict the future in a methodological and pragmatic way. I will try to practice this, you said we should do it every day, so let’s try, but let’s try to predict the future of humanity from this point of view on this day in 2025.

JA: I think there will be a major crisis and that everything will be fine afterwards, but a major crisis means an awareness that it will come from a major war or a climate catastrophe or both at the same time, and then there will be an awakening, we will have this victory of gratitude, altruism, awareness of the importance of generations. It’s very simple: what we have to do is not make any decisions that are not in the interest of future generations. That’s how we make personal or collective decisions, by thinking about whether they will be useful for future generations. It’s the fact that we didn’t think about future generations that has led us to this ecological catastrophe. So that’s what we have to do in our personal lives and

in our political lives. Some countries have begun to include in their constitutions the fact that any decision that is not in the interest of future generations is unconstitutional, which is very important.

AS: Thank you very much, Mr. Attali. Will we see you in São Paulo this year at the latest?

JA: Yes, I assure you. Thank you.

Vertigo Nam Le

So far our lifeway seems to be to burn the great gift. Transduce the longing of all things into short use.

Do you remember

In the forest

I was felled by a wild longing for forest. Through my bones, my colon, I felt a silent, rupturing note as if from a seismic survey gun

And then: diapason. Shocked out of all my structures, my prior strong assemblages in smithereens I fell to my knees

The world now all-sound, sheer sound, vertiginous, And I fell – was falling – filling – full –while sound continued pouring into me like feeling, oceanic.

Did you make space for it

Every animal and industrial and abiotic sound, yes, but they were night buoys upon human coefficients –And I was surging beneath & around them on godly currents. How

Were my ion channels shaken in harmonics?

I thought I heard salt waters sliding against sweet, zero-resource dictions of turbulence, gates in the water unlocking to other frequencies:

What did you hear

Mouths in the trees.

Leaves fizzing sun to sugar, brightwood.

Metabolism of the green granules, endosymbiont song.

O but what a strange sun harvest that alive’s a gas – so easy!

Soilbank, with its innumerable sonic frictions. Ribbed rouse & forage, slow right rain of solum,

Bellows of the anther’s pollen sacs & the stigma swells, longs. Seed minims.

Everything playing the instrument of everything else.

Everything using each other out of need.

As the root cilia shiver did my cells’ mechanosensors as well?

I wonder:

What must have been their membrane dynamics?

And the water

On shore, all the sedge blades sharpening, sharpening. Under:

Granular sounds of sand, conglomerate, bedload shift –

The black-green water rings with hidden folded light.

Crab-speak, the high hurt-songs of coral mineralising, crystals growing into water’s ghosts. Sub-heard groans of ancient seagrass rhizomes, plankton, larvae, bivalves, mollusks, the count-cancelling fish.

As the infrasound that goes through continental shelf and sea and keeps its surety my hearing went benthic:

Actual ocean, ur-ocean, its full, fine-grained reserve: acid and iron, microbes splitting water – plasmic hiss –great sea creatures in deep sound channels making music that will witch your blood. Or

Or: Maybe the molecules of me remembered I was mostly nothing. Void and vibration.

And so we synced with all-nothing, became one super spiral ganglion –Superman, suspended, super-hearing.

Too much to say

Final cause –entangling sound and happening:

All of it:

Womb-pulse of mother planet. Arrhythmia.

Unfathomable gift of push and sudden suck – cytoplasm gush –of cell into cell

Biomass breakdown into fuel

And the star spectra sing in unearthly keys –chromatic runs of fusion, metals, magnetism. Long searching solar winds.

Longing being the first principling. Like for like and for not-like (the law of grace’s go with it) –order and its lack

I was filled, I was emptied.

So, there –the teetered kilter of all things.

Heat and light, sound, salt and sweet, humidity, pressure, density, gravity passed through me

And here was I, structure of structures, centered in the still point.

There is no still point

Granting animacy – call it lifeway –

Superman? More like Ménière

To the vital need – call it love –

Of, and along, every gradient.

Here’s what you hear: Clog & haemorrhage in the labyrinth. Cystic stretch, ulceration, Cerebrospinal subcurrents. Disorder of the inner ear.

No still point. No center. What you feel is a body’s nausea at incalculable speed: speed of planet spin, greater speed of its slinging around the sun which slings even faster around the galaxy which is flung faster still, at speeds of unknown order]

No. I was still.

Stillness is relative

Everything is relative –nothing alone itself. Everything needing everything else to know anything about itself.

Electrical flux through slick nerve sheaths; chemical synaptic exchange; blood thud & dendrite sizzle in the bone pan

Structures in structures.

Structures calling to dissipation. I know what I heard.

What’s any revelation but brain deranged? I’m asking for the world.

Guanajuato Troubadour

Kim Cheng Boey

In: The Singer and Other Poems. Melbourne: Cordite Press, 2022.

Living is easy, you can believe it, sitting on the bench, listening to the happy-sad voices of the mariachi band rolling out the numbers from the pavilion. Easy to forget the images on the hotel TV, the reel of bodies in the trench of young women in Juarez, while grieving mothers demand answers, easy to believe in human happiness as you sit

watching lovers and families stroll round the garden or feasting on the lawn, easy to forget the kidnapped migrants, seventy-two of them, shot by the cartel mafia because they couldn’t pay the ransom or be hitmen and drug mules. All a distant blur, the girls and women raped, trafficked or killed, and the high wall and fence at Tijuana.

In the dappled level light, you watch two children run rings around their parents, and what comes back as the boy stops and his eyes meet yours in the fading sun is you in a boy’s body, chasing your sister around your parents, their long shadows kissing on the lawn bordered by the Five Trees at the Esplanade

and you don’t think of the father and boy drowned in the Rio Grande, south of the lives they never reached. You don’t notice how the moment is gone even as the light passes through it, as the shadows stretched from the oaks and pines, then all is tuned a dusky blue. You forget the Black Christ you stood spellbound before

in a small church off the main street, the darkness weighing more in the flickering light of candles glancing off the ebony body, and in that dark creed of pain and death the questions seemed to recede in a silence wrapped around the slack form in the nave, girded with a white brocade loincloth. You leave

the park and fall in with a tourist throng trailing after a troubadour, a pied piper decked out in medieval tights, and you forget the gallery of the dead in the museum that filled Ray Bradbury with such dread. You had walked up the hill, after coffee and huevos rancheros, past churches disgorging believers

decked out in Sunday lace and silk, in the splash of winter sun on colourful houses of peeling stucco, the medley of earthy hues, and past the drowsy Mercado where a withered crone wanted to tell your fortune, past a rubbish-choked creek and screes of dirt and ash, through crumbling tenements and close to noon

you arrived at the Museo de las Momias and entered the twilit rooms. Propped up and encased in glass display, naked or shrouded, uninterred because they could not pay the tax levied on the deceased, the mummies disprove death can be beautiful or serene as the numberless dead Christs you have seen.

You had your fill of death after the mother and her newborn and the coffined corpse dressed in his Sunday suit frayed and blended the same bleached tone as the bone. You walked out into the living daylight, and stayed still in the mild winter sun, thinking about the dead you carry in the urn that can weigh like a seed,

light as the smoke unfurling from your father’s cigarette, or the ash he became when his coffin was conveyed into the fire, or heavy as his bones felt in your hands afterwards. Heavy and light are the measures of the dance death the troubadour makes to the chords night plays on his guitar, the human cry waiting for release.

light as the smoke unfurling from your father’s cigarette, or the ash he became when his coffin was conveyed into the fire, or heavy as his bones felt in your hands afterwards. Heavy, light are the measures of the dance the troubadour makes to the last chords death plays on night’s guitar, as dawn breaks over the hills like peace.

Words Together Are Melody Keyna Eleison

Translated from Portuguese

It’s difficult to be calm. It’s difficult to remain silent.

And not for lack of desire, nor for inability to inhabit the voids. But because the world, the world we live in, insists on crossing our bodies with urgencies that never cease. News that reaches us before breakfast. The messages that pile up. The demand for a stand. The need for a response. The insistence on being available. We live in a time that disarrays time. Where pausing has become a privilege and resting a dare.

For many people, silence can be a luxury. For some, an aesthetic choice. For others, an innate right. The silence that makes up contemplative reading, the silence that precedes confident speech. But for some of us, silence has a different biography. A different burden. A history marked by silencing, erasure, censorship, and forced absences. Silence was often what we were left with –and not what we chose.

And yet, when we dare to speak, when the word emerges, it is met with suspicion. Our voice is questioned before it is even heard. Our tone is read as aggressive. Our emotions, as out of control. Our denunciation, as victimization. We have often been denied the right to express pain without being pathologized. We have been denied the right to exist in doubt, in hesitation, in complexity. Calm is not a safe place for us. It is often a requirement. A price for being tolerated. An imposed code of conduct.

But something breaks when we recognize this. There is a power that begins to vibrate the moment we refuse this dramaturgy of the acceptable. When we look at calm and silence not as imperatives, but as territories to be re-signified. When we turn them into choices, into strategies, into conscious gestures of care, and not into modes of containment. When we say: I can be silent, but only if the silence is mine. I can seek calm, but not if it is imposed on me. The poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence] leads us.

That’s why participating in a Bienal that begins with a gesture of listening has something profound about it. And, at the same time, restorative. It’s not only a curatorial gesture. It’s an ethical gesture and a spiritual gesture. Because listening means opening up space. And to open up space is to cede control. Listening means running the risk of being transformed by what you hear in order to give in to the power of a word-poem.

To see this word come from the body, the trajectory, and the language of a living Black woman. Conceição Evaristo – writer,

thinker, teacher, grandmother, daughter, worker of words and life. Conceição, who writes with the firm hand of someone who knows what is at stake. She writes from the place of someone who has survived and is not content with survival. She writes like someone who plants – knowing that to write is to cultivate time, to wait for words to germinate in the body of the other.

By taking a phrase from one of her poems as its impetus, the 36th Bienal is making an alliance. It recognizes that there is knowledge that isn’t in theory books. That there is thought, that there is wisdom that springs from the flesh, from the journey, from the neighborhood, from the street, from pain, from joy, from listening, from time-space. That the poem can be the starting point for an artistic, curatorial, and political project. And even more: that the poem is a form of thought. Not the opposite of reason, but its sensitive continuation. A thought that pulses, that breathes, that flows.

And the verses chosen for the title of the 36th Bienal – and here the gesture is more important than the exact words - don’t come as a motto. It doesn’t impose itself as a fixed title. It doesn’t define. It doesn’t delimit. It invites. It opens. Allows. Summons. And perhaps that’s why the verses form a sentence that begins with a negative. “Not all travellers walk roads.” A “not” that doesn’t close, but draws a line so that the world doesn’t swallow us up. A “not” that protects. It delimits the body. It marks territory. It affirms the possibility of other ways of existing. Saying “no” is a survival technology. And, in times like ours, also of reinvention.

There are paths that don’t reveal themselves at first glance. There are routes that are created during the journey, not when they are traced. The not that we carry on our bodies is not denial by absence – it is refusal by choice. It’s a way of taking care of oneself, of remaining whole in the face of impositions. The not offers us a margin. It invites us to deviate. And in this deviation, there is discovery. A different ethics is possible, more organic, fairer with time and with the body. The not is not closed: it opens, displaces, displaces in order to open. It’s not an opposition, it’s a condition. It’s what allows another form of step to take place.

The no we learn to utter doesn’t turn against the yes – on the contrary, it prepares it. It protects it from being automatic, from being a response without choice. The no affirms the space for discernment. It frees us from the requirement to correspond and gives us back the right to choose. It is a no that preserves what is possible.

It doesn’t need to be hurtful, it doesn’t need to harden. Saying no means listening carefully. It means saying: not like this. Not at this time. Not under these conditions. And only then, with our bodies respected, our time taken care of, our affection whole, can we say a yes that is true. A yes that is born whole, and not in pieces.

And from this gesture comes the public program called Invocation. Because to invoke is to call people together. It’s recognizing that you can’t do it alone. It’s knowing that thought needs an echo, friction, and exchange. Invocation is more than a program title. It’s a call. A willingness to listen collectively. An open field where diverse voices meet, not to converge, but to coexist. Where dissent is welcome. Where difference is celebrated. Where affection is not a prop, but a method.

Invocation is also a reminder that the Bienal doesn’t just take place in exhibition halls. It takes place in encounters. In conversations. In displacements. In the bodies that cross each other. In the silences that are shared. It is not limited to contemplation, but extends as a living experience. As a territory of construction. And that’s why it needs more people. People with the courage to propose. People willing to listen. People with enough affection to support what isn’t ready.

Because thinking here is a collective gesture. Conceptualizing here is a process of listening and reverberating. It’s letting other words come in, other stories unfold, other possible worlds be sketched out. Curating becomes sharing. Programming becomes a rite. And each person who gets involved, who offers time, thought, care, presence, affection, reinforces this living network that sustains the Bienal.

And this network is not invisible. It vibrates. It pulses. It breathes. It dances between calm and fury. Between silence and words. Between gesture and thought. Between what we already know and what we still can’t name.

The Invocation is that vibratory field where affection becomes method, and method becomes body. A body that feels, remembers, dreams, and commits itself. Because there is no curatorial practice that doesn’t involve bodies. There is no exhibition project that doesn’t summon presences. Even when everything seems technical, when everything is dressed up in objectivity, the body is there – in the moving of boxes, in the opening of doors, in listening to others, in deciding collectively, in tiredness, in enjoyment,

in exhaustion, in the vibration of being together. The body is there when the word fails. And it’s the body that keeps listening when we no longer know what to say.

In the Invocation, it is this collective body that manifests itself. Not as a sum of parts, but as a shared field. A multiple body that pulses out of sync and yet dances. A body that recognizes that the politics of art is not only made of ideas – but of gestures, with shared food, with decisions made in haste, with whispered conversations in the middle of the night. A body that knows that concept is also tiredness, also joy, also contradiction.

That’s why thought doesn’t impose itself here: it presents itself. It doesn’t enter by breaking down the door – it kneels, it asks, it lets itself be transformed. The thought that guides is the thought of the encounter. It’s a thought that bends, like a stem before the wind. It listens to the tide. It recognizes that there are other ways of knowing.

This is a Bienal that is organized not just by themes, but by forces. By winds, waters, shadows, memories. A Bienal where the word “curatorship” takes on another meaning: that of weaving worlds together with delicacy and precision. And it is in this space that the Invocation is inscribed as a fundamental dimension of curatorial work – not just as a mediation activity, but as a radical practice of listening.

Listening is a risk. Because when you really listen, something in you has to change. Listening isn’t just about giving up the word, it’s about opening up your body to be touched by it. It’s a gesture of vulnerability, but also of trust. And it is in this trust that a network is built. A network that is neither neutral nor protocol. A network made of bonds. A network of people who, when called upon, respond with presence. People who are not there out of obligation, but out of implication.

That’s why the Invocation is also political. Because it refuses to repeat the hierarchical structures of knowledge. Because it doesn’t put artists in the pulpit with the public as the audience. Because it doesn’t turn thinking into a spectacle or listening into adornment. The Invocation does not claim to produce conclusions. What it offers is a fertile field of reverberation. A territory where knowledge doesn’t need to be resolved – it can simply spread.

This Bienal doesn’t ask for answers. It proposes questions. And these questions aren’t just asked from the head. They go through the body. They are questions that hurt, that provoke, that

demand time. These questions don’t fit on a wall caption. They live in encounters, in movements, in circles. And it is in this space between knowing and not knowing that the Invocation establishes itself as a practice: like someone who lights a candle before starting an important conversation. Like someone who prepares the ground before a ceremony. Like someone who calls out to someone not to dominate, but to listen. Invoking is an ancient gesture. It comes from the time when the world was still populated by visible and invisible forces. And perhaps that’s why it’s so necessary now.

Because we are living in times of extreme speed, continuous noise, saturation of images and words. And, at the same time, of deep emotional emptiness. Production time pushes us forward without allowing us to pause. But the time of listening requires a response. It requires delay. It requires silence. It requires presence. The Invocation is that return. It’s that pause. It’s that place where the word can breathe before being spoken.

To invoke is also to remember. And to remember, here, is an ancestral verb. Because what we call memory is not a static archive. It is living matter, in movement. Memory, for us, is a kind of future. Because remembering is also imagining. And imagination, as Black women have always taught us, is a form of resistance. It’s taking care of the impossible, which requires people willing to cross the unknown. To not know in advance. To accept that the process is the truest thing. The Invocation doesn’t seek formality, it seeks a bond. It doesn’t seek applause, it seeks presence. And to be present today is also to be whole. Even in the failures. Even in doubt. Even when tired. Present as someone who offers what they have: word, gesture, listening, silence, anger, joy, shadow, song.

And so it is woven: with visible and invisible threads. Threads that don’t follow a single direction. Threads that intertwine, tangle, undo and redo themselves. The Invocation is this living tangle, which is not resolved, but offered. As an offering, as a presence, as an attempt. Because, after all, to be here together is also to accept that we are all in a process that only reveals itself as we walk. And there are paths you can’t take alone. It means walking with other beings, visible or not. It’s negotiating each step with the mud, with the water, with the sun that burns and the shade that shelters. It’s knowing that each movement implies the whole. This is also what the Invocation is: a journey in common, a mutual listening, an art of walking together.

Affection here is not adornment. It’s not smoothing. Affection is a method. It’s what sustains difficult decisions, it’s what supports hard words, it’s what sustains the body when doubt comes. Affection is what resists when concepts fail. When theory proves insufficient. Affection is what keeps us going even when there are no guarantees. Even when we’re tired. Even when there is conflict. Because there is care at the center of strength. And there is strength at the center of care.

The Invocation is, in this sense, an essay on the world. An outline of a sensitive politics. A practice of radical democracy. Because to invoke is also to take responsibility. It's knowing that whoever calls, responds. Whoever summons, listens. Those who make space need to support what comes in. And to sustain is not to control. It means accompanying. It’s caring. It’s keeping alight the flame of what we don’t yet know how to name.

And what we still can’t name is what matters most. The possible that escapes categories. What doesn’t surrender to ready-made words. What can only be recognized in gesture. In the lingering gaze. In the welcoming pause. In the assumed error. In the silence that reconnects us. That’s why silence here is not absence. It is power. It is full presence. Silence is the space where words are born. It is the womb of discourse. It’s the interval between one breath and the next. Silence is the place of deepest listening. The place where time bends. Where the spirit manifests itself. Where affection becomes language.

And there’s an enormous beauty, and perhaps a subtle revolution, in starting a Bienal by listening to a poem. A poem by Conceição. A poem that says no. It forces us to stop. Not to carry on as usual. It invites us to another cadence. It reminds us that art, when it’s alive, doesn’t settle. When it’s alive, it demands. When it’s alive, it transforms.

It is the body that summons other bodies. The voice that calls other voices. The idea that agrees to fall apart so that another can be born. It is ritual, it is conversation, it is politics, it is breathing. It’s a web, it’s a root, it’s a flame.

And finally, perhaps that’s what this Bienal is proposing: that we can experience thought not as an imposition, but as an invocation. That we can think with our bodies, with time, with each other. That we can affirm that art is a field in dispute, yes – but also a field of enchantment. That there is beauty in resistance. That

there is politics in delicacy. That there is joy in refusal. That there are whole worlds in the gesture of saying: not like this. But like this, yes. In a circle. Invoking.

And I was there. With my whole body. With my heart trembling at what is revealed when words give way to listening. When gesture asks for presence. When time disarms control and makes way for what pulses deepest. I was there with everything I carry: the memories of those who came before me, the silences that have passed through me, the refusals I’ve had to learn to utter, the joys I insist on cultivating as a way of existing.

Because it’s not just an event. It’s not a program. It’s almost a breath. A collective breath. A call that echoes inside and out. And I heard that call. Not as one who responds to a duty, but as one who recognizes an ancient song. Something that vibrates back in the days of the first stories told around the fire, in the nights when the forest became a voice.

In the Invocation, I saw myself as a mirror and a drum. I was a word, but I was also silence. I was a path, but I was also a stone. I was a presence crossed. I was water carrying the questions I still can’t answer, but which are already transforming me. And I continue. I keep invoking. I keep offering. I continue sharing this field where art bends to the time of the world, where politics meets affection, where thought dances and becomes a body – a common body, a living body, a body in assembly.

We Hear the Sound of the Ancestral Forest

Linh Nga Niê Kdam

Translated from Vietnamese

I am Linh Nga Niê Kdam, a child of the Ê Đê ethnicity. I traced my origin back to Ea Sút buôn, 1 Ea Pok town, Cư M’gar district, Đak Lak province, Vietnam. Our Ê Đê community amounts up to 500,000 people, living mostly in Đak Lak Province, with a few smaller groups scattered in Đak Nông and Phú Yên provinces. Up until now, the Ê Đê people still remains a matrilineal society, with the women holding social privilege and material inheritance. Marriage proposals are initiated by the bride’s household, and the groom will move into his wife’s family afterward. As such, the children also carry their mother’s last name. In times immemorial, as with other ethnicities in the highlands, the Ê Đê people practiced a polytheistic and animistic religion. In order for any activity to go well, one must pray to the Yangs.2 Should you achieve success, you must pay respect; likewise, if you offend the Yangs, you must ask for forgiveness. In order to communicate and negotiate with the Yangs, people would use the sound of the copper gong chime as medium. Since the Yangs played such a crucial role in Ê Đê people’s daily life, the practice of worshiping them also merged with our agricultural calendar, our life cycle, and our societal relationships. Depending on the scale of the favor asked, the size of sacrifices also changed: for example, the bigger the request, the larger the animals and the rice wine vessels. When a ritual concluded, the sacrificed animals would be shared among the buôn members, which was the prelude to a communal gathering. In addition to offerings, the playing of sound also factored into the ritualistic process, as well as entertainment during assemblies. That was how music, and sound, permeated our lives, from rituals to communal activities. As such, the sound of the gong chime continuously echoed across jungles, mountains, and buôns. This sonic proliferation heralded the birth of many distinct gong chime tunes. Eventually, people came to an agreement that each occasion or event would have its own gong melody. The prayer for a particular Yang should be accompanied by one particular sound, while the invocation of another Yang would be harmonized with a different tune and rhythm. This also helped inform others from neighboring buôns – through the sound of the gong chime – about social events that were taking place. The gong chime tunes are divided into categories: to invite deities (Rieo Yang, Drong Yang), to make public announcements (Ieo wit hgum), to greet guests (Drông tuê), etc.

In the highlands, we also listened to the leaves rustling, the waterfall roaring, the wind whistling, the light breathing, the river

murmuring, to create spontaneous tunes such as ones that resemble waterfalls (Drai ênai), hailstorms (Yan pliêr), or spinning wheels (Kong Dar), Chiriria! Every year, our densely scheduled festivals and rituals allowed people to showcase their talent, thus facilitating the exchange between one buôn and another. Our original gong playing was eventually expanded to include bamboo instruments (such as the hluê ching), whose tones were modeled on those of the gong. Playing with these instruments amplified our everyday musical practice in the hours after agricultural work or the nights after a ceremony. In addition, we also sang rhymed narrative poems about the origin of the Ê Đê, heroic Dams,3 and beautiful H’Bias.4 These poems could be sung for days on end, captivating the ears of hundreds of people.

The Ê Đê are among the highlands groups that possess the greatest number of traditional musical instruments. In addition to the gong chime that any ethnicity in the Central highlands would have, the Ê Đê people also created countless instruments from materials found in nature, such as the ancient jungles, or known from daily life, modern or traditional, such as lồ ô bamboo,5 wood, wild pineapple silk, buffalo hide and horns, or even telephone cord. These instruments can be classified into percussion, wind, plucked and bowed string, or vibration – all generating unique sounds, with none resembling another, yet all tugging at the listeners’ heartstrings. While the gong chime is normally used to invoke deities or for communal announcements, other instruments are used in specific situations: for intimate sharings (Đing buôt, Tak tar, Đing Tút, Goc), love confession (Gong, Kni, Bro), funerary rites (Đing năm, Đing Tút), or signals for attack (Ky Pah).

Even the children and adolescents from the region developed a high sensitivity to sound and musical talent, thanks to a social calendar full of successive rituals and festivals, as well as a desire for entertainment after work or ceremonies accompanied by sound. As soon as they opened their eyes, their ears were filled with sound as part of the ear-blowing ceremony, which initiated the birth of a new soul. This soul was then nourished by music throughout their lives, such as in the occasions in which the gong was played on family reunions (clearing the fields, celebrating the first sprouting of rice or the first harvest). When they finally went through their various initiation ceremonies into adulthood – marriage, building a house, giving thanks and good wishes to their elders – the sounds

continued to echo throughout their lives, accompanied by the sounds of the jungle, the mountains, and the rivers.

I am formally trained in Western classical music at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. However, as an Ê Đê woman, I remember being mesmerized by the sound of my people’s music already when my head barely reached my father’s belt. As a child, I had been lulled by the gong chimes of different ethnicities in the Central highlands, from the excited rippling sounds of the Jrai, the deep timber of the Bâhnar, to the sublime jubilance of the Sê Đăng, and the allegro vivace of the Ê Đê. Those childhood memories, embedded in sound, lay dormant for many years, before awakening in sonorous vibrations in 1980, when I once again heard the melodies of the Đing Tút, made from straws by female farmers who had come to greet me in a traditional stilt house in M’Drăk (Đak Lak Province), which had a warm, fiery hearth and smoke-stained walls.

From that point on, I only listened. I listened to the calling sounds that invite people and Yangs to different ceremonies, such as the Bâhnar’s celebration of the first drop of water from their water source (et tnok dak), the Ê Đê’s commemoration of the first rice bundle after each harvest (hoă esei mrâo), the Jơ Lơng’s appreciation for the first sprouts of rice plants (Ét dong), the Jrai’s dislodging of the wooden tomb house after the deceased’s spirit has ascended (Pơ Thi), the Sê Đăng’s display of gratitude to heaven and earth (bơ nê), and the Mnông’s prayer for health. These sounds from the exalted gong chime ensembles not only highlighted the joy of the communities, but also enchanted my ears and my heart. Before I realized, I had dedicated my whole life to them. Unfortunately, my happiness remained incomplete. My heart sank when witnessing the multitude of issues that had drowned the unique sounds and the beautiful music of various communities across the Central highlands, my Ê Đê community in particular. The first factor was the shift in religious practice. The gradual erosion of our polytheistic worship triggered the disappearance of the ceremonies and rituals accompanying it. As new religions infiltrated the sociocultural sphere of the highlands and replaced the Indigenous festivals with their rites, the Yangs gave way to other figures of worship such as Jesus or Buddha. Another factor was the clash in cultures between highland people and the authorities from lowlands, who imposed foreign cultures on our own. Yet, the final blow to our sound-based culture was a grueling

period of economic crisis post-1975, when Indigenous communities were forced to trade their sacred instruments for food and basic amenities. Due to economic scarcity, our festivals also became sparsely organized, and the sound of the gong chime also faded away from daily life. This period, followed by the influx of Internet culture, saw our youths washed away by new, attractive information and lifestyle. Their disinterest and ignorance of ancestral customs led to a long hiatus from traditional sound-making and musical instruments – some completely vanished. Even our gong chime was adapted to play the Western heptatonic scale. For elders like myself, who held our traditions close to our heart, we watched with grief and nostalgia as our culture slowly became obsolete.

Luckily, after Unesco recognized the space of gong culture in the Central highlands of Vietnam as an intangible cultural heritage, the government also had a shift in awareness and perspective. They started to generate and circulate more information through social media, such as documentaries about cultures of different ethnicities that call for the revival and preservation of highlands culture, including our traditional music. Nowadays, across five provinces in the Central highlands, besides the Festival of Gong Culture, there are also frequent performances for visitors. From the churches’ gong chime choir that plays at Sunday mass in Kon Tum, the Experience the Gong series every Saturday in the city center of Pleiku, to the twice-weekly Echoing Gong program in Buon Ma Thuot, our community tourism has incorporated Indigenous cultures, particularly our music, to impress visitors from inside and outside the country. Classes organized by musicians young and old to teach youths how to play the gongs and other traditional instruments began flourishing. All of this is so that the sound of instruments becomes more prevalent in our children’s lives once again, so that they can nurture pride for their culture.

The music of Central highlands is reviving across communities. Not only does it function as a means of communication with the Yangs and among Indigenous communities, but it also plays the role of attracting visitors and cultural enthusiasts to the Central Highlands. Our instruments offer visitors a glimpse into our life, people whose roots are deeply entrenched in the land. This is a reason to be cheerful, even more so since our youths have now learned to listen to and appreciate the beauty of our own sounds. They have learned to take pride in wearing our traditional clothes, not just

for performances, but also in other activities such as weddings and ceremonies. In my eyes, their faces brighten up even more when they don the brocades woven by the skillful hands of their sisters, mothers, and grandmothers.

And I, with a heart that leaps and sinks with the beats of Central highlands culture, have finally found myself at ease, when I saw that the gong chime culture has returned once again, pulsating within the red soil of these plateaux.

I welcome you to my homeland, to immerse yourself in the sounds of the gong chimes, be they mellifluous and soft like the ones from the Jrai and Bâhnar, or cheerful and bright like those of the Sê Đăng, or vigorous with a bravado like the ching knah from the Ê Đê. An “assembly of sounds” made from copper, bamboo, wood, and stone synchronize our invitation.

Let’s hold hands, and step into the swaying melodies of the jungles.

So that you can listen to and then fall in love with the sounds of the Central highlands, like I did many years ago.

1 A buôn is semi-equivalent to a village, the smallest collective unit among different ethnicities in Vietnam’s Central highlands, including the Ê Đê people.

2 The word for god or deity in Ê Đê language.

3 An Ê Đê term to signify an honorable and talented man.

4 An Ê Đê term to signify a gracious and beautiful woman.

5 Bambusa procera, a particular type of bamboo native to Vietnam.

Gourd-Women Creuza Krahô

Published originally in Portuguese in the PISEAGRAMA magazine (Belo Horizonte, n. 11, pp.110-117, nov. 2017) and in English in the book Terra: antologia afro-indígena (PISEAGRAMA + Ubu, 2023), translated into English by Brena O’Dwyer

I live in the South of Maranhão, in the state of Tocantins, in a village called Aldeia Nova. We are an Indigenous population composed of 180 people. I was born in a village named Galheiro on the 5th of February 1971, at noon, near a jatobá tree (Hymenaea courbaril) also known as tehcré, where my life of suffering began, as it is not easy being an Indigenous woman.

I wanted to be breastfed, and my mom wanted to sleep, but she could not, as she needed to take care of me. She wanted to see me grow, so she took care of me, and did all the needed resguardos 1 and I grew up. I am 5’2 feet tall; I have light brown skin and dark wavy hair. I am a Krahô woman.

And this woman became a wanderer, “hunting” for a better life for my people with no rights. No rights to exist as persons in the world we live in, escaping from those who harm us. I was and I still am seeking rights that our ancestors did not have, such as the right to health and education.

Today I have a busy life: I went to Tocantins to study and finished my professorship. I thought I was done studying, but people told me “Keep going, you can do it!” And, once more, I did. I got approved for a master’s program and had to leave my family. I prepared my luggage and started thinking about all that… I left my children with their father and wondered if he would take care of them the same way I did. Sometimes I would cry from the pain in my heart, so much it would choke me, and I would get away from people so no one would see it.

I was admitted by the Federal University of Goiás and was there for five years. I never got used to it, but I finished the program even though it took a lot of suffering. Sometimes I had no money to eat on my trips back and forth from my village to the city. I couldn’t afford a snack, even the cheapest stuff. I had no scholarship, I had nothing, and I had to watch my colleagues eating. Sometimes, good-hearted colleagues would offer me something: “Would you like an ice cream?” and I would accept it. After we got used to each other, they would help me and share everything with me. I was thrilled with my non-Indigenous friends, whom we call Cupen. It is tough to leave your home to study and work. There is no space for Indigenous people in the city and urban life can get very complicated.

After our first contact with non-Indigenous people, we suffered trying to learn the Cupen culture. The same thing does not

happen with many Cupens who have no interest in getting to know us and respecting us. I put in a lot of effort to understand how the Cupen think and live. The majority of Mehi women – our people are called Mehi in the Krahô language – do not speak Portuguese, but they can understand it.

Even though we mix with the Cupen we never lose our way of being and living and we do not forget the knowledge of the Mehi. We still have the marks on our bodies corresponding to parties, singing, painting, hunting, fishing, and the making of baskets. We are Mãkraré, but the whites, the non-Indigenous, call us Krahô. In our culture, the woman never leaves her family, so everything I went through was very hard. But at the same time, my husband was very supportive and so were my daughters; that is why I left to study, because they knew that studying would allow me to have important knowledge in order to understand the Cupen.

All the anthropologists who visit the Krahô do their research with the men. They never research women. The women are left behind, always at the back of the houses. They don’t invite women for their researches. I observed this with my husband, when he was still alive. I would ask myself: Why do anthropologists come to our village to study only men? Why do they only walk with men? The messengers in the village are all men; they give out the news. But it is a mistake to think that men know everything.

Women have a lot of knowledge, they make all the adornment the hunters use, because hunters cannot walk around unadorned. If they walk unadorned, they won’t catch anything. This is the way we learn: we know how to paint a body and cut and dye hair Krahô style… The only person who can cut other people’s hair is the eldest woman, who does not get her period anymore. A young woman cannot do it. We participate as observers, watching how it is done, how the hair is cut. But, even so, the men are the ones who take the messages about the women’s work to the anthropologists and then back to the women.

As a researcher, I saw that most things are not how they were registered, because the women are the makers, and the men are the messengers. I could hardly believe the amount of stuff the elder women knew! There was never a book about the stories of the Krahô women, about how they do things; never a book about a Krahô woman. The anthropologist might be a man or a woman, but they only get in touch with the men.

I did research with the women. I went after these women. In the Pé de Coco village, I did research with the women and then with pajé2 Tejapoc, who died last year. What he told me was different from what the women told me. I had to ask myself: “What is the truth?” I had the voice recorder playing, listening to a man talk, and I asked myself and the other women “Is what he is saying true?” The women said “No!” “So, what should I do? I want to know who is telling me the truth!” And that is how I kept on with my research. There came a point when women pushed men back. I knew I had gotten something right, and it came from the women. Then I said: “Men also have a lot to do, but there are things that men say are theirs and they are not.” The women anthropologists I’ve seen arrive only talk to men about researching. They look at the women and walk away, they think we have nothing to say. But the ones who really have a lot to say, who do a lot, and who we should learn from are women.

When I arrived at the Rio Vermelho village, the elder Ahcrokwyj died two days later. I was so sad. I still had to talk to her. I had spoken to her at the hospital, asking if she was better. The last day we spoke on the phone she told me, “I’m not well. I’m going to tell you the truth, I’m not going to live, I’m going to die.” Wow, that made me weak, and I thought, “I’m not getting my interview now.” Then she died and I had to research how she made the medication to prevent pregnancy. She was the one who made the medicines from plants so women wouldn’t get pregnant. And I missed that part because I didn’t get there in time, as I was involved with other interviews. I had already talked to her about how to get pregnant, but the interview I wanted, about the medicine – what leaf is it, what root is it, what bark is it, how the Krahô women avoid operation – I missed that.

In the village of Rio Vermelho, some women only have one child. I asked them: “Why do you only have one child, and not more?” “Because we take medicine.” “And you don’t want to get pregnant?” “No, because you can’t have a lot of kids.” Then I asked who made this medicine: “Ahcrokwyj,” they said. And Ahcrokwyj told me: “When you get back from the city, you set a date and we’ll sit down, and I’ll show you how it’s done.” But that’s the part I missed. I don’t know if there is another Krahô woman alive who makes that medicine, because I’ve asked several people and I haven’t found another one.

I asked the women about everything. Several resguardos needed to be made. Many kinds of resguardos. I asked about food, crops, how to plant bananas, why plant bananas. Why plant cassava, corn, rice. Then I started to do research with the hunters and the pajés. What does pajé mean? What is the pajé that white people talk about? We call them Wajakà. Wajakà, for us, is a person who sees with another eye. Not with the same eye we see. He has one eye in the back and one in his arms. This is the pajé. It is night and he can see everything, like it was day. But he cannot see during the day because it is night for him. The animals that talk to him are animals of the night.

The older pajés that die turn into animals and talk to the young pajés, translating themselves so as to reach the living, talking about which plant to use for fevers, headaches, and menstruation. They teach the different medicines. So, I researched in order to know who the pajés were. There are two kinds of pajé: one evil and one good. First, I went after an evil one, to understand why he was like that. And he gave me his perspective. He can make a hunter die overnight. This kind of disease inflicted by a pajé cannot be cured by doctors. Doctors may prescribe some medicine or injections, but the patient will remain sick, and the pain won’t stop.

I visited a person with that kind of disease at the hospital. A good pajé had to come to the hospital to cure that person, because he knew it was not something that had come with the wind. A disease that comes with the wind gets to people while they sleep; the disease enters the body. It blows strongly and it enters. In our village, when the wind blows, we cover children’s heads. And we, the grown-ups, turn our backs to it. Among the Krahô, the good pajés are old; it won’t take long for them to die. If the evil pajés get together for a spell, they can kill them quickly.

There was an old lady called Pipi, from the village of Campos Lindos. She retired in Goiatins. I was interested in some things, so I asked her: “Can I record you?” She asked: “How much will you pay me?” I joked: “I will pay you when I retire.” We were both joking. “After I record you telling me stories, I will translate it and we can make money! But you have to tell me the stories first.” I wanted her to talk about the resguardos needed to become a runner, because she knew them. Why can’t the running girls back in the village sleep the whole night? Why can’t they date? We talked for three days. We cooked fish. She told the stories and I listened and recorded.

After a week, I went to my small farm to work and said goodbye to her. She said: “I will hug you because I might not be here when you come back.” I asked why she was saying that and she said: “I am scared, Creuza, now that I retired I will go to the Campos Lindos village, and if the people know I retired they are going to kill me.” It was true. She got her money from the bank, bought what she needed and headed back to her village. After a week, at six in the afternoon, I heard someone yelling my name on the other side of the river. It was a message saying Pipi had died. I didn’t have time to go back. It was swift. She had diarrhea, was not feeling good, went to the city and died. The doctor didn’t have time to give her medicine. Researching women is different from studying men. But I also went after the older men, who knew me, respected me. Some pajés are women. There is a good, very good woman pajé. But she can’t get in the middle of the male pajés or she will harm herself. So, she’s always out. If people tell me that a pajé is not good, I will not go. I cannot talk to him. Evil pajés don’t teach the medicines to anyone but themselves. An evil pajé won’t cure his own family. He only does evil.

In my research about the Krahô resguardos, the older men and women told me stories about the gourd-women and the croámen.3 These stories helped me to organize the information I collected. In the story about the first Mehi, the gourd-women were the first to learn from the Sun, our hero creator, about the resguardos. The Sun taught the gourd-women that, in other to comply with the resguardos, they should wear the husks and leaves of the Cerrado biome. It is female wisdom: the women keep the resguardo practices alive in the villages, as well as all the care needed for the body; they have this memory. They know what kind of food should be used, how to eat it. They know how to start a resguardo, how to live through it, and end it, thus renewing lives in the community.

The lives of women, men, girls and boys, everyone, are renewed. For example, a woman, after having her first child, starts a set of resguardos and, when it ends, she will be strong, as she did not get sick and neither did the child. She will now be renewed to feed on other things and to use leaves on her body that will not harm her or the baby. Life is renewed, she leaves the house, reaches the patio, and engages in other activities.

Men also enter a new life after they are done with the resguardo of their first child. But the ones who maintain the

resguardos, the transformations of people and the renewal of life in the community are the women. The women organize men’s resguardos, so they can renew their lives and so the village dynamics are in motion. Mehi women learned from the gourd-women to be mentors for men.

Our baskets keep memories. The Sun gave women bodies that carry things, and baskets are used on women’s bodies for this purpose. The Sun taught women how to make baskets, for example, in the shape and design of the armadillo shell. The memory about this making is passed on, and only those who have an excellent memory manage to make the baskets – those who have done the right resguardo for the memory.

There was a village where the memory resguardo appeared. In that village, people were forgetting the Mehi way of being and living and would run off into the woods, turning into creatures of the woods. An elder man was naming these beings. Tewa was one of them; it was a Mehi who had forgotten the resguardos. Thus, he burned his leg, which became pointy and thin. He would go around killing the Mehi in the back with that weapon. That Mehi, who had lost his memory, turned into a forest creature that liked to kill the Mehi.

The memory resguardo also makes good singers. Such training must begin when children are still young, and must be carried on until death. The older men and women pass on this knowledge to the young. This wisdom is passed on to the young through the Mehi chants. Keeping the memory of being Mehi, strengthening oneself, are important elements to prevent the transformation into forest creatures.

The memory resguardo involves learning the songs related to not eating things from pans and plates, but only from a moquém. 4 People should eat fire-roasted food; they must use barks, roots, and grass to clean their heads. The smells, essences, consistencies of non-Indigenous utensils and products must be avoided.

Not all will be singers; many show that they will become singers around the age of nine. Parents and grandparents begin to include the child in this knowledge, and they will not have the same life as other youngsters; they will eat exceptional food, use exceptional crafts, get special body paintings. Throughout life, these children will be trained to be singers and will have mastery over the Mehi memory.

Women singers keep a seed in their heads, which came from the gourd-women. This seed is like a computer that stores memory. For this memory to be kept clean, these women must use dew water, as well as various types of medicinal plants from the Cerrado biome, and they must bathe in the river in the mornings. There are songs for the day, night, midnight, dawn. To remember all this, a woman must make a rigid resguardo that transforms her body so that she will be able to keep the seed. Women singers also use medicine to see better, to see at night and to not feel pain. They follow a strict resguardo, they can only have sex during the day, not at night. Throughout the night, they sing.

My grandmother survived a massacre in the 1940s, perpetrated by non-Indigenous farmers, that killed a lot of Krahô. In fact, we suffered many massacres throughout the history of our contact with non-Indigenous people. Hundreds of people were killed. We were many, and after these massacres we are few. We are from the Mãkrarè tribe, we used to live in a huge village, bigger than the city of Carolina, in the state of Maranhão. These people scattered and each took their own name: Mãkrarè, Kukoikamekra, Panrékamekra… They were many and scattered; they each crossed the Tocantins river and scattered. The Krahô of today came from the Mãkrarè.

My grandmother was ten when the massacre happened, she was there. That day, the older sisters were taking care of the children in the house while the women were in the fields. Two Cupen cowboys came and left a big bull. The Krahô men were hunting for the Ketuaie party, the ending of the resguardo of three men, two women, and lots of children.

The Cupen were giving the big bull away and said we should get all the Krahô together for the party. The bull was a gift. Not everyone could understand as they didn’t speak the language, but many people came. Then the two Cupen left. At the end of the afternoon the Krahô killed the bull. The hunters arrived, they ran with the log and bathed. Then, they went to the patio to sing. At midnight they heard a gunshot, and the women started asking what it was, if it was their husbands. Later, in the early morning, they heard a second gunshot and short after that, many more gunshots, one after the other. Many Cupen came, targeting the Krahô, killing everyone, using their knives. And people started running into the forest.

My grandmother ran toward a Cupen called Corá, who knew her. He told her to go and wait at the capoeira,5 where the banana trees were, because when a bullet enters the banana tree it goes cold, so it wouldn’t hurt them. Corá let a lot of Krahôs escape. My grandmother entered the capoeira and hid in the middle of the banana plantation. They hid the whole day, listening to gunshots and screams. She was there with three small boys, who were crying; they didn’t know if their parents were alive.

After a full day, one of her uncles passed by, recognized her, and asked: “If you are here, where is your mom?” She said she didn’t know where her mom was. The uncle said they should leave. All the Krahô from the nearby villages were running away from new attacks. They were all going in the direction of Serrona, known as the “pass to hell,” a place with many dangerous mountains where they could hide. They met and ran. She took a basket with a cloth to wrap herself.

They walked for a month before getting there, hiding during the day, walking at night. They didn’t make fires; they only ate raw food and lived hidden, quietly, without making a sound, because the whites were hunting them. They would cover the mouths of small children so they wouldn’t cry. There was an older man with a knife injury, he was quiet, he didn’t complain because he didn’t want them to get caught. When they got to Serrona, she found her mom; her dad had died fighting in the massacre. They communicated through a gourd, making noises with it. When someone left, they would return and make a specific noise to warn about any danger. Sometimes, they would go back to the villages to get something like a pan and then return to Serrona. When they went to the village, they saw many dead people and felt bad because they hadn’t received a funerary ceremony. The farmers would visit other Krahô villages and say they were next, that they should run. And that is how farmers occupied the land. That is what happened to the Pitoro village. The Krahô stayed in Serrona for a long time.

One day, a priest from Pedro Afonso went to some of the more distant Krahô villages and asked them to seek for survivors. Those Krahô talked to the survivors and asked them to return. They returned, and with the priest’s help, they rebuilt other villages, close to the place where the massacre happened. They buried the dead, the bones and what was left of the bodies. The priest said

that this would not happen again; then SPI (Indigenous Protection Service) came and demarcated the Indigenous Land in 1945.

After the massacre, the Krahô never finished that party. From that day on, many resguardos were left behind. Almost all the children were killed. From that moment, we became the Krahô. Life resumed, but it was never the same. The knowledge and body resguardos were shaken. After that massacre everything changed, technologies came, health and education services that didn’t respect the Mehi way of life came. People are no longer interested in the daily resguardos. The resguardos are moments that are not lived as intensely and together anymore.

After 1994, I started working with education alongside my people. I want to build a school, Krahô style. Our education should be differentiated, but that never actually happened. As a teacher, I believe the school can teach our youngsters the Cupen knowledge that is needed to fight for our rights and against future massacres. But we must also respect our own education, and that can only happen if we follow our resguardos, if we learn to enter the forest with our elderly.

1 Resguardo is the name given to any period in life that requires special care. It is also how some acts of safekeeping and protection are called, usually done by isolating oneself during illness or temporarily banishing certain foods. It is a traditional practice among different Indigenous populations in Brazil. Some resguardos are done specifically after the birth of a child. Throughout the article the author gives different examples of resguardos.

2 Pajés are individuals responsible for conducting rituals, curing, and sometimes invoking spirits, and often have leadership functions. Pajé could be loosely translated to shaman.

3 Croá is an Amazonian fruit.

4 Wood grill used to smoke fish and meat.

5 Capoeira is a place with secondary vegetation composed of sparse grass and shrubs, which grow after the original vegetation has been cut down.

Nude Protests in Africa, the Digital, and the Human

Naminata Diabate

On September 2, 2024, an X account tagged me (@NaminataDiabate) with news of a half-naked protest event called #SayNoToCorruptionInUganda. The post published a series of videos and photos featuring three half-naked young women protesters aggressively heading to Parliament in Kampala, Uganda, to denounce corruption, promote transparency, and most importantly, demand the resignation of Speaker Anitah Among, who faced serious corruption charges. One of the videos, just 30 seconds long, shows the activists, Kobusingye Norah, Kemitooma Nyirabagabo, and Aloikin Praise Opoloje, with their breasts, faces, thighs, and underwear painted in Ugandan flag colors. Their bare skin serves as a canvas on which they write, “no corruption,” and “for the children.” As they walk decisively toward the Legislative Assembly, the three women chant in unison: “Save the women, save the children, stop corruption.” Whereas one of them holds up a Ugandan flag, two of them hold up placards that read “Corruption fucked me so HARD I am here to mourn,” “UGANDA IS NOT POOR, they are stealing our wealth.”1 These calls, injunctions, and charges, combined with the anti-corruption activists’ vulnerability and resistance, constitute a form of humanity in practice for social transformation. Countless social media platform accounts posted, reposted, liked, disliked, shared images and videos, and created handles (#AnitaMustResign, #March2Parliament, #StopCorruption), producing a secondary and amplified discourse that was, and still is, larger than the protesters’ initial performance.

The Ugandan Freedom Activists, their name, through their messages, encourage paying considerable attention to children and women, who are especially vulnerable social categories. Individuals, communities, and institutions should ensure the well-being and safety of those. In fact, a community’s sophistication should be judged based on how it handles its dissenters and the most vulnerable.

As the activists neared the parliament, which they hoped to storm, security officers thwarted their intention, arresting them around midday. Later, they appeared before a Chief Magistrate, denied the offences they were charged with (common nuisance contrary to the Ugandan Penal Code Act), failed to secure court bail, and were thus remanded until September 12. The arrest, prosecution, and treatment of the women received a mixed reception from the public, especially those online, with viewpoints

varying considerably from celebratory to neutral and ultimately denunciatory, suggesting potential debates on the significance of nakedness in public dissent.

This nude protest and attempted assault are a culmination of a series of anti-corruption demonstrations since July 2024, when accusations of corruption against high-profile public officials, including Speaker Anitah Among, surfaced. In May 2024, the Associated Press reported that the United States had imposed sanctions on her, her husband, and other officials over alleged serious corruption and abuses of human rights.2 The United Kingdom also followed suit, declaring that Among owns property in the UK, which she failed to disclose to authorities. Both countries imposed a travel ban on her. President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986 (almost four decades) and who called for the probe under pressure from international institutions, however, failed to enact domestic sanctions to protect influential political allies. In 2024, the NGO Transparency International ranked Uganda low on its corruption perceptions index. With the least corrupt countries ranking highest, Uganda came in at 141 on the list of 180 countries,3 eliciting public outrage and resignation. Museveni’s forty-year rule and his lackadaisical approach to handling adequately the impervious mismanagement of resources that may be serving the interests of the political, social, and financial elite come close to dehumanizing his fellow Ugandans.

The dehumanizing claim and the extreme form of demonstration as humanity in practice cum humanizing reflect the force and vision of one of the activists, Aloikin Praise Opoloje. Born to a peasant family in eastern Uganda, Opoloje explains the profound effects of corruption on her community: “By the time I could understand the word ‘corruption,’ I bet I had seen more than 1,999 forms of it,”4 she explained at the November 2024 Human Rights Convention in Uganda. The forum of her exposition indicates that humans and their challenges and potentialities are at the center of all endeavors. Navigating the hardships of her origins, Opoloje became a law student. In 2023, she almost lost her life while delivering her daughter, confined to an overcrowded maternity ward with three other struggling mothers and receiving care from an overworked midwife and two undertrained interns. “I laid there for 45 minutes without sutures to stitch me. When my mum asked the midwife for help, she replied, ‘What do you expect us to do?’ We had to bribe

her with Shs 5,000 to get hidden sutures,” Opoloje recounted. She concluded, “Now, for me, what made me realise this was having my life at risk on a deathbed. Having my life being valued at a bribe of Shs 5,000, and this is what most of us Ugandans do.” 5 A cheap life, a cheapened life, a disposable life is a dehumanized life. Museveni’s and other public figures’ refusal to acknowledge these corruption-distorted stories teeters on the edge of dehumanization.

However, to counter the elected officials’ inaction to implement accountability measures, including criminally prosecuting offenders, the public finally took to the streets, hoping to express their dissatisfaction and call for transparency and their rights as citizens and humans to be sanctified. One of the protests erupted in July 2024 when dozens of youngsters marched toward Parliament, chanting “Anita Must Go.” 6 Security forces arrested fifteen of the protesters and loaded them into military-style vehicles. Over months, reportedly non-violent demonstrations and planned ones were quelled and foiled, respectively, on account of the organizers’ failure to secure proper permits.

Rather than heeding his fellow humans and citizens’ rightful demands, Museveni denied their humanity cum rationality cum subjectivity by dismissing them in a televised address as “foreign-funded agents,” “elements working for foreign interests,” who are playing with fire.7 Had the president considered the dissidents rational humans with the capacity to assess their living conditions and the ability to express expectations from their leaders, Museveni would not have consigned them to infantile positions, who lack the capacity to make informed decisions. To relegate mentally healthy adults to the thinking level of children is a dehumanizing method. The anti-corruption women, fueled by their vulnerability and a heightened sense of urgency, then decided to escalate their dissidence mode by mobilizing a collective uncivil self-exposure and aggressiveness. This strategy accomplishes multiple and non-mutually exclusive goals: it offers resistance against unrestrained rule, signals vulnerability, expresses outrage, shames Museveni and its ruling class, pressures decision-makers, uses body as a form of conflict management, lodges grievances against mismanagement of resources, mobilizes the power of sexuality for greater visibility, and marshals the disseminating factor of social media platforms to enlist the support of national, regional, and transnational institutions.

Conventionally, highlighting vulnerability (bodily self-exposure) and offering resistance (self-exposure) are understood as antithetical. However, what kinds of human creativity and political agency emerge when one moves beyond and outside the dichotomy to reformulate resistance as drawing from vulnerability? What is the resistance between victory and freedom? Are the exposed bodies of women always already vulnerable? In exploring these questions, it appears that vulnerability (bodily, psychic, ideological, and visionary) undergirds and sustains the competence to contest unjust practices. One can go as far as to surmise that without vulnerability, in all its forms, resistance cum contestation in the form of deliberation becomes dubious, unsustainable, corrupt, and perhaps bankrupt. Conversely, resistance breeds more vulnerability as the power that one opposes may not immediately cave in. In fact, it may react boldly by creating multiple management strategies as I demonstrate in my book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, published by Duke University Press in 2020. This is precisely how the September 2 protest unfolded. Resistance and vulnerability ought not to be considered antithetical; they are co-constitutive. The capacity to recognize one’s vulnerability and mobilize the strength to showcase it is an exercise in humanity, as hundreds of thousands of women have undertaken it over decades since the colonial contact.

The relation between resistance, victory, freedom, and humanity is unsurprisingly unstable. The anti-corruption protesters’ vulnerability yet power to strategize a demonstration for social transformation is ignored by some social media reaction posts that castigate the activists for resorting to a cheap, shameless, and anti-woman gesture. Yet, a different interpretation may consist in viewing them as marshalling a form of victory and freedom against a system that seemed designed to keep them helpless cum dehumanized. In sum, they showcased a sophisticated political rationality with their defiant disrobing and the attempted assault alongside several components from social movement tried-andtrue tool kits. Consider these steps, without which a contestatory action is simply an exercise in chaos and failure:

1. articulate the action’s purpose and goals;

2. organize a group and assign roles;

3. plan the action, such as deciding on its form (sit-in, halfnaked gesture, boycott, etc.), choosing the location & time, securing a permit, and preparing contingency plans;

4. prepare messaging and materials, including creating slogans, chants, signs, banners, flyers, zines; developing talking points and press releases; using social media to mobilize: hashtags, videos, etc.;

5. address safety guidelines and concerns, ensure accessibility, and arrange legal support;

6. the day-of includes set up, check-in, pre-action briefing, and keeping the attitude intentional and focused; and if all goes well, the final step,

7. follow-up, which consists, among other tasks, in debriefing with the organizing team, thanking participants, sharing event documentation, and sustaining the momentum.

The Ugandan Freedom Activists’ insurrectionary nakedness followed most of these steps, but they did not conclude the list based on the ideal scenario, as they ended up being committed to custody. However, their action helped galvanize others, build a coalition, and bring the limelight to their cause. During their incarceration, multiple human rights organizations militated for their release. Most importantly, the activists sustained the momentum through their availability to engage with the news media and their presence on social media. Back in February 2025, The Monitor (Uganda) published an article with the arresting and defiant title “Gen Z protest Icon: We’re all going to die, either way.” 8 The lead image features the three anti-corruption activists standing, smiling, and facing the camera. Whereas two of them raise the iconic victory hands, one holds an illegible paper.

Thanks to social media, I learned about #SayNoToCorruptionInUganda. Since the publication of my book, my X account has

been consistently tagged with news of naked protest events around the world. This means that #SayNoToCorruptionInUganda benefited tremendously from the hypervisibility afforded by digital media. Since the mid-2000s’ media democratization and penetration, collective and female defiant disrobing has received renewed attention and increased visibility. Content creation and distribution via TikTok, X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and related sites have inspired news reports and activist work. Mediality and digitality are potent instruments for three reasons:

1. their capacity to evoke powerful emotions;

2. their portability as they inherently reach larger audiences with superior speed and ease, and finally

3. their diverse sites of appearance and access through mobile phones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, and TV monitors, leading to the digitalization of life.

A visually saturated world may qualify as the era of bodily and psychic overexposure. However, before the current moment, women from dozens of countries have taken to the streets naked or have flashed their nudity to resist during acute national social and political crises and to punish elected officials. Uncivil collective self-exposure has been mobilized in urbanized centers by women of all ages, educational levels, and occupations; be they widows, civil servants, mothers, street vendors, university students, young, and elderly. These instances reveal the near dehumanizing social and political climates that compel some women to deploy what they perceive as their most deadly weapon.

Hostile counterattacks against protesters, such as legal threats, arrests, verbal attacks, physical brutality, and even murder, further reflect the severity of conditions provoking the gesture. Indeed, naked agency as a form of conflict management occurs in such diverse contexts as (perceived) electoral injustice, land grabbing, corporate greed, police brutality, the importation of foreign toxic waste, unethical clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies, and adverse neoliberal policies.

Paradoxically, the digital sphere participates in humanizing and dehumanizing practices in more ways than space allows

me to expose here. Through social media, activists learn, adopt, and adapt approaches from other contexts, thereby building a shared, yet unspoken, bond of vulnerability and hope.

Simultaneously, that promising outlook develops a sinister aspect of the Internet. Due to its sharing affordances, once the women’s naked images are captured, enclosed, surveilled, archived, and released into the digital sphere, the activists are left with a marginal principle to predict the outcome of their initial intention. As pictures of bodies journey through time and space, and across media, platforms, and languages, these images suffer a relentless wave of slippages, sympathetic responses, confusion, often inconsistent responses, and misappropriations. Weeks, months, years, decades, and even more after the event, various entities may continue to deliberate on the activists’ disembodied and often decontextualized images. Such is the case with the anti-corruption Ugandan women’s half-nakedness.

The fact that digital technology has enhanced humanity by bridging gaps and improving communicability and visibility needs no rehearsing. The promises of digitality to end unfreedom, injustice, and inequality have, however, been sidelined by technocapitalism and digital capitalism. Following the corporate logic of even absolute accumulation, biological information and images are captured, collected, classified, exploited, modeled, intercepted, stored, optimized, filtered, and converted into data points. The protesters, allies, and other stakeholders freely offer images and videos of the demonstration to social media platforms to amplify the activists’ message or to showcase Museveni’s repressive methods. The platforms’ parent companies – Meta, ByteDance Ltd., X Corp., Google, which are worth billions of dollars – have in turn transformed, often “freely,” acquired emotions, images, gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings into easily exploitable samples, data, markets, “banks” for the global and neoliberal capitalist accumulation of profit.

Hyperdigitization leads to iterability. Thus, accessing Kobusingye Norah’, Kemitooma Nyirabagabo’, and Aloikin Praise Opoloje’s images amounts to reliving them. Each click on their photos or videos turns the protest and arrest into a re-performance. The Ugandan Freedom Activists did not protest only once; they are still protesting, demonstrating, resisting, and that ad infinitum. They resist each time someone screens their videos or views their

photos. Like screening a movie a second or third time, and perhaps experiencing more intense emotions and bonding with the actors each time, social media may enhance the potency of these protest events, making them more memorable in ways unavailable before.

Concluding

The anti-corruption Ugandan women’s event reveals the mutually imbricated dynamic of de(humanization). On the one hand, the workings of exploitation, corruption, and denial of subjectivity/ rationality equal dehumanization. On the other hand, contestation and expression of resistance and vulnerability lead to an exercise in humanity cum humanity in practice. The ongoing nature of insurrection and counter-insurrection genuinely reflects the very notion of (in)humanity in practice. These processes must be in practice because their crystallization (intentional or otherwise) signals the end of humanity as we know it, and that must be thwarted at all costs. For humanity to survive, it has, must, and ought to be in practice.

1 Emphasis in original.

2 Associated Press, “US Sanctions Uganda’s Parliament Speaker, Her Husband and Others Over Corruption and Rights Abuses”, US News, May 30, 2024. Available at: www.usnews.com/ news/us/articles/2024-05-30/us-sanctions-ugandas-parliamentspeaker-and-others-over-corruption-and-rights-abuses. Accessed in: 2025.

3 Agence France Presse, “Ugandan Leader Says Anticorruption Protesters ‘Playing With Fire’”, VOA, Jul. 20, 2024. Available at: www.voanews.com/a/ugandan-leader-says-anticorruption-protesters-playing-with-fire-/7706564.html. Accessed in: 2025.

4 URN, “Aloikin Praise Opoloje ‘The Nude Protestor’ What Drives Her?” The Observer, Dec. 6, 2024. Available at: observer.ug/ news/aloikin-praise-opoloje-the-nude-protestor-what-drives-her/. Accessed in: 2025.

5 Ibid.

6 The Daily Monitor, “Security Operatives Have Intercepted About Fifteen Protesters Chanting ‘Anita Must Go’ at Railway Grounds as They Attempted to March from Nasser,” in Facebook, Jul. 25, 2024. Available at: www.facebook.com/ watch/?v=1696519801192520. Accessed in: 2025.

7 Agence France Presse, op.cit.

8 Enock Wanderema, “Gen Z Protest Icon: We’re All Going to Die, Either Way,” The Monitor, Feb. 2, 2025. Available at: www. monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/national/gen-z-protest-icon-we-reall-going-to-die-either-way-4910106#story. Accessed in: 2025.

Horizon of Fullness

Hervé Yamguen

Translated from French

1

Men-and-women

At the break of dawn

After a moment attending to their dreams

Gaze at the depth of the sky and the treetops

And call out to those around them

Who are running and wasting time

To lift their eyes

To open their senses

To look at the beautiful moon speaking the wisdom of slowness

Men-and-women

Have slept with all the wounds held close to heart

Wounds that have reshaped them into

Open beings

Doors, windows

Aware of all the colors within their bellies

Men-and-women

Met and united

Making a vow around the fire

In the whirlwind of this world needing repair

By watching the sky

Then perceiving signs of rain

In the density of their words

Men-and-women

Recognized each other singing, all naked

For their intoxication of joy lies in that nakedness

In being with the winds

In being shadows among shadows

In being crossroads of beauty

That possess not what makes things ugly

Men-and-women

Carried by fertile dialogue with dusks

And enchanted mornings

Go marvel at spiderwebs

So that they may become spiders, builders

Of a horizon of fullness

To stand in the heart of a horizon of fullness

Is to form a circle of hands open to infinity

The moments of the seasons

With the rain and the stones

And the earth and the trees

And all the words never spoken

That were only there to say

How to resonate with the essential

That nourishes life

And multiplies all living things

A horizon of fullness

Lies between the lines of proverbs

That bind our gestures to the making of peace

With all that, around us, is us

To dive into a horizon of fullness

Is to care for what trembles in silence

To take the time

To savor the fruits

And to sow their seeds

To tend to the time of the seeds

To become thousands of trees

To learn by oneself

To sow oneself as abundance

In forests scorched and polluted

To make a horizon of fullness real

Is to spread the world’s beautiful music

Which one has become in a dance of fire

With dawns and dusks

It is to open one’s hands like thousands of birds

To hold back nothing

Except a perfume of light and joy

Of being with ants, butterflies, fish

And the men-color-vitality

Of natural bananas and papayas

In weariness and illness

Amid devastated landscapes

How many are they who listen

In the depths of morning

To the roosters’ songs

And who awaken the blood

With the density of nocturnal silence?

Amid thousands of scents

While the sirens blare

In a crowd rushing every which way

Men-and-women

Stirred by their dead

Make stories to pass on

The memory of tending to all that trembles in the winds

Like bees

Men-and-women keep their hearts to the task

To weave burning words

To live up to the experiences of beauty

That bring joy to their way

Of taking part in the repair

Of the fissures in the guts of the landscapes

When men-and-women

Listen to the noises outside

And to the words of their kin

Each day opens toward worlds

Their breathing, paced by the music

Of their long journeys

Turn them into oxygen

Vessels of knowledge and a compass

For children walking

In the beautiful reddish light of sunrise

Vortex Recitation of Passage

Edimilson de Almeida Pereira

Translated from Portuguese

…we must speak of tradition not as an absolute and immovable necessity but as one half of an evolving dialectic – the other part being the imperative of change.

Chinua Achebe1

Ia certain master-of-the-blues (duke ellington) said or seems to have said or is said to have said and I keep saying that he said that “the blues is always sung by a third person; the one who is not there.” the story, according to the third persona, is a crossing. against the walls & the command towers, the one who narrates makesunmakes-remakes the road movie of memory.

– when there is no image nor iris what will a language be? a body learns to forget its place of anchorage. from the inauspicious background (history) emerge artifact boats] of capture and also the syntax of another world (which landscape?) expulsing the Ex Machina Law enemy of the dream.

– when there is no fever or fence what is human a flint a plant forgets what it has learned in order to learn again

from history (dark ocean) rise voices, rhythms of speech and also the concert of another machine (the world) extracting from Death

the sign that breathes

the experience of the disorder imposed by the system of exploitation

(complete the word do not annihilate the poem)

demands from the artist less hunger and more technique?

All that, except the factory regime?

(mark the dilemma with an X, not the answer)

– when there is no sacrifice and no weapon above one’s head a phoenix-navel wanders from its continent to find again in the sea (of crimson stories) another language-humus hymn and also silence – at the end of the sea precipice, the world without north or south is a home-on-the-move. the experience of (dis)order explored in the vertigo of the

(don’t complete the word, release the poem) desires more than this or that. Nothing, nothing less than goosebumps.

(don’t waste time, the dilemma is the beginning)

“he who is not there” – rooted in wanderlust, nevertheless weaves his song: against the blitz on memory    THE MEMORY/ against the contempt for what we dance    THE DANCE/ against the rejection of what we speak    THE SPEECH/ against the barbed wire   LES VOYAGES

we, the PASSERS-BY of these calles, sisters of ours by commerce, abandonment & children – hear the symphony of Chaos in the organs of safety.

so many ideas and bodies have been fulfilled in this city – it will feel like a widow if they are expelled.

The Speculator who plotted revenge built palisades, and bought the parliament owes us

a night at the COFFEE COTTON CLUB a party with GOLD TOBACCO COOL a phrase without DEATH PRISON BLOOD

perchance, in this city indebted to victims, those who pass through remain with their ivory bones, their books of sand.

the PASSERS-BY are absent from the photographs, but their hands relieve the cramps in the palaces. years have passed and the rafters of the ships have become arms.

in this city of hidden forests and anchors wedged in the ear, something announces itself: from the sea comes news of death in a feast] contrary to life.

but the PASSERS-BY – with their golden thought – wound with ecstasy the Body in Chaos.

the song sung by someone who isn’t there is no use to the ears of merchants – where do the missing notes resound? the song that is more vivid than the rapture speaks closely to the one who

writes furiously   of exile dances   on the island and claims to be other   in themselves

– when human is to be a phoenix a language inaugurates the tropics between mountains, a flowering vertebra] in the ocean.

– when the phoenix has a thousand shadows human is to be the infinite form of the cliffs – pulse, edge, lineage without borders.

– when the language speaksphoenix zen-heads-diquixi reinvent the road movie the color-theft the mother-soil of the world]

1 Chinua Achebe, “Change and Continuity in Education,” in Daily Times, Jan. 20, 1977.

Ukutshisa

Setting Fire to the Archive

Panashe Chigumadzi

Ukutshisa: to burn, to set fire, to re-generate, to renounce material being for historical being.

Sth… we re-member the 15 September 1881, seven days after the full moon. Sth, as King Lobengula’s induna uMagwegwe Fuyane sets fire to the King’s palace, the Queen’s dwellings, the Royal Enclosure, the sheds, stables, byres, coach-houses, and even the wagons of King Lobengula’s father, the late King Mzilikazi. When his task is finally finished, uMagwegwe, koBulawayo’s induna, shakes the hand of the missionary who accompanied him and says: “Ngilambile,” that is to say, “I am hungry.”

Sth, uMagwegwe has done well on the King’s instructions. Three weeks ago, King Lobengula informed his people that it was his pleasure to transfer koBulawayo, which he founded in 1870 as the great capital of the amaNdebele state, the Queen of the sacred Matobo Hills, from his residence at Amatshe Amhlope, the White Rocks near Matobo Hills, to the hills of Umhlabatini.1

Sth, koBulawayo must burn because amaNdebele’s King’s capitals are never permanent. Our ancestors have taught us humility before the cosmos, nature, and time. We must not attempt to conquer the cosmos, nature, and time through permanence. Instead, we must live in rhythm with them, for continuity, eternity, and endlessness hold the center of our cosmology and philosophy.2 Eleven years since first arriving in Amatshe Amhlope and reaping from its surrounds, it is time we move on and allow nature to return to its rhythm and replenish itself.3

Sth… we re-member the 3 November 1883, the climax of Umvukela wamaNdebele, amaNdebele’s uprising against Rhodes’ people. Just before fleeing north, we re-member as King Lobengula instructs his trusted induna Sivalo Mahlangu to leave last after setting fire to his capital koBulawayo.4

Sth, uMahlangu sets fire in four places and detonates koBulawayo’s ammunition stores. Sth! A huge explosion! Rhodes’ settler column descends on the inferno as large smoke columns ascend to the heavens.5 The column commander’s galloper rides right into the inferno’s center but he sees nothing except for hundreds of dogs running about. Crestfallen for the lost loot, Major Frederick

Burnham, the famed US scouting mercenary, will record with sorrow that the fire:

had burned up an immense amount of ivory and treasure, along with valuable hides, horns and skins that [Lobengula] had accumulated in his storehouses. We made a great effort to put out this fire, but it was impossible to do so, and we saved very little of what must have been one of the most extraordinary collections ever made.6

Sth… But.

A scavenger manages to save King Lobengula’s iwisa made of rhino horn – “the great knobkerrie of Lobengula himself” – and presents it to Rhodes, who, despite the protests of his people decrying the lack of a major water body, demands that his Bulawayo is built atop the smouldering ruins of King Lobengula’s koBulawayo. Burnham will go on to say: “It seemed particularly fitting that this emblem of authority should pass from the grasp of the most powerful Black monarch of Africa into the hands of the strongest white ruler who ever dominated that continent.”7

And so it is, as the November winds scatter the ashes of Lobengula’s royal town, the British South Africa Company’s mercenaries declare it the new seat of Rhodes’ Cape to Cairo fantasy.

And yet… It is not enough.

After centuries of terror, all white settlers understood –military conquest is good, but spiritual conquest is ultimate.

And so, amidst the 1896-1897 Umvukela-Chimurenga – the anti-colonial war waged under the prophetic leadership of amaNdebele and maShona spirit mediums – a New York Times headline declares on 25 June 1896: “Killed the Matabele God: Burnham, the American Scout, May End Uprising.”8 On behalf of Rhodes, Frederick Burnham, the famed US mercenary, assassinates amaNdebele’s spirit medium and leader, Umlimo, in his sacred Matobo Hills shrine.

We re-member July 1898: the British South Africa Company hangs the Shona spirit mediums Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi in Salisbury. Their heads are presented as trophies of conquest to Queen Victoria and taken to the Natural History Museum, in London, where they lie today.

Still. It is not enough.

So obsessed is Rhodes with Matobo, a portal to the Black ancestral world and historical being, that he enshrines his spiritual conquest by instructing his burial atop those very sacred ancestral hills. For Rhodes so fears the Black spiritual world, that he gives his own body, his own afterlife to its desecration, his own material and spiritual being, so that whiteness will not perish but have eternal life. By entombing himself in Matobo Hills’ sacred ancestral shrine, Rhodes embodies and enshrines the perpetual desecration of Black physical and spiritual life, and consecrates settler colonialism’s divine ordinance – the ongoing ritual of anti-Black violence is necessary for the psycho-spiritual perpetuation of the white world.9

Sth… we re-member the 18 April 2021, south-easterly winds blow as a bushfire breaks out on Table Mountain’s slopes and catches on the alien Stone Pines Rhodes insisted on planting on Indigenous soil, rolls down to Cape Town’s densely populated neighbourhoods, the Rhodes Memorial Restaurant, the University of Cape Town’s middle campus, displaces 4,000 students and soon engulfs its library, burning down the African Studies Library and its material archive of rare African collections. The fire of Rhodes’ Pines reduces capital H History – rare books, hard to find volumes, more than 1,300 sub-collections of unique manuscripts and personal papers, a 26,000 title pamphlet collection (800 of which are rare or old titles in European and African languages published before 1925) and one of the most extensive African film collections in the world10 – to ashes. Over the fire’s crackle there is a cacophony of cries:

“An incalculable loss!”

“A tragedy!”

“This is a cleansing! The ancestors have spoken!”

“Rhodes has fallen through fire!”

“Fire has been set to our Future!”

“The fire of Rhodes’ Pines completes the fire of Rhodes Must Fall.”

Sth… we re-member July 2019, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo’s inaugural “Queen Loziba Lecture.” I am now answering questions about my lecture on the portraiture of the

Ndlovukazi Lozikeyi Dlodlo, Last King of the Ndebele, who led her people after her husband King Lobengula fled during 1893’s Umvukela wamaNdebele.

“Why are you using colonial archives to tell our history?”, a young woman demands of me. The gallery, filled to capacity with Bulawayo’s young and old, murmurs in agreement.

I go on at length about archives and access until the historian Pathisa Nyathi intervenes:

“How many of you have seen iwisa leNkosi uLobengula?”

The gallery’s silence answers.

“You haven’t seen it because it was taken by Rhodes after Nkosi uLobengula burnt his capital koBulawayo when he fled the war with the British South Africa Company. After the British conquered us, African material culture was demonised and despised, so our people wanted nothing to do with it. When you ask about archives, you must know that the question of colonial archives is a question of material culture.”

Sth… we re-member that both sites of King Lobengula’s koBulawayo were burnt as part of our Indigenous Nguni cosmological and spiritual traditions. The royal capitals of amaNdebele Kings were never intended to be permanent. The philosophy of our African material culture demands humility before the cosmos, nature, and time, and so demands living in rhythm with them. AmaNdebele moved when their Kings died or when the rhythm of their natural surrounds – grass, game, water – became exhausted. Whenever amaNdebele Kings moved capitals, the previous sites were burnt to the ground, leaving no mark of their corporate existence. Royal capitals were spiritually fortified. These medicines could not be allowed to fall into the hands of evildoers and so everything was fired when the Kings left.

To speak through uNyathi’s mouth: “A settlement that has been deserted bears the cultural signature of the people who once lived there.” This is to say, the settlement bears isithunzi seNkosi. In isiNdebele, isithunzi is the “shade,” “shadow” or “aura” – that is, the aura cast by people as they go through life, the shadow that grows when a person does good or diminishes when they do bad. As Black people, we are constantly aware of the shadow we cast, and so, we fiercely guard our isithunzi as our reputation,

“dignity,” “integrity,” and, ultimately, the legacy we will leave behind. Beyond the notion of an “aura,” isithunzi is best captured existentially as “being.”

The King’s capital is the embodiment of isithunzi seNkosi, the being of the King. Like the body of the King, the capital of the King is never meant to be permanent. To capture a part of it is to capture his being. This is what amaNdebele wished to guard against when they burnt an abandoned settlement – the capturing of their being. Their being could not be allowed to fall into the hands of evildoers and so everything was fired when the King left. The settlers understood this too. This is why they rejoiced when they found King Lobengula’s iwisa among the ashes and handed it to Rhodes, who wished to usurp the material, spiritual, and historical being of amaNdebele.

Ukutshisa is then, to speak through uCedric Robinson as he reflected on the amaXhosa Prophetess uNongqwause’s infamous 1856 Cattle Killing (the destruction of providence enfleshed in the midst of the British Wars of Dispossession), in Black Marxism’s much misunderstood and therefore controversial seventh chapter on the nature of the Black Radical Tradition, ukutshisa is then “the renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses.”

To burn koBulawayo was to renounce actual being for historical being.

To burn koBulawayo was to renounce material being for historic being.

To burn koBulawayo was to preserve the ontological totality of our people.

II.

Ukukhumbula: to miss, to remember, to re-member, to re-member historical being.

Sth… we re-member March 2015, as a crane lifts the bronze mass from its stump, crowds gather rapt, ready for Rhodes’ Fall, and S’thembile Msezane rises in the spirit of Chapungu, the Great Bird of Zimbabwe, eight soapstones of which were looted after Rhodes commissioned Great Zimbabwe’s excavation. Seven

were returned, the eighth bird still lies in Rhodes’s bedroom in Groote Schuur Museum.

Msezane does not seek our ancestors’ permanent domination of the landscape. Rather than erect permanent monuments in the vein of Rhodes’ arrogance, Msezane re-members our ancestors’ humility before the cosmos, nature, and time: we must not attempt to conquer the cosmos, nature, and time through permanence –we must live in rhythm with them, for continuity, eternity, and endlessness hold our cosmology and philosophy together.11 Msezane re-members the historical being of our ancestors; she does not turn to bronze, iron or clay, she turns to spirit.

Like the endless music that accompanies spiritual ceremonies, the philos-praxis of spirit possession – those in the present communing with those in the past about the future to come – is the syncopation of time’s rhythms, re-membering past, present, and future in historic simultaneity. To speak through the mouth of the ancestor John S. Mbiti:

A person dies and yet continues to live: he is a living dead, and no other term can describe him better than that... They belong to the time period of the Zamani [past], and by entertaining individuals in the Sasa [present] period, they become our contemporaries. The state of possession and mediumship is one of contemporizing the past, bringing into human history the beings essentially beyond the horizon of present time.12

This is the living archive. The archive that exists beyond the Western conception of the archive as material archive. This is the historical being that Rhodes sought to usurp in not only murdering our spirit mediums, the living archives of our historical being, but in entombing himself in the sacred Matobo Hills, the portal to our cosmological being.

Ukukhumbula – the practice of re-membering our ancestors – is an intergenerational archival technology of historical memory and the preservation of historical being. This is why we are asked to khumbula our ancestors. To re-member our ancestors. In turn, we ask that the ancestors khumbula us. For them to

re-member us. This is why our people lament those who do not have kin – you will have no one to re-member you, who will pour libations for you when you die?

Ukukhumbula, to remember, is an active form. This is to say, ukhumbula is a call for an honouring action. You re-member/ miss your sister, you give her a call, and say, “Ngiyakukhumbula.” You re-member/miss your mother, you show up at her door, “Ngiyakukhumbula.” You re-member/miss your grandmother, you go to her grave, and say, “Ngiyakukhumbula.” I re-member you. You are re-membering her being.

Ukukhumbula – to remember, the praxis of the living archive is intergenerational memory. In African cosmology, we understand that water is where memory lives. Water re-members our roots and routes. This is why water holds spiritual practice across Africa and Afro-diaspora together. Water is more than two thirds of the Earth’s surface – our bodies and our ancestors re-member this science and its centrality to life, death, and the breaths in between. Water is the saturation of everything that has existed. Water was here first, before many of our lands. Water holds history and communicates beyond our recent memory. This is why, after five hundred years separated by the sea, African ancestors can speak through Toni Morrison when she describes ukukhumbula so:

[T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory – what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”13

Morrison spoke in the tongues of Yoruba ancestors who teach us “Humans are like water that always flows to its beginnings.” To re-member is to flood the world as bodies of water do. “Re-memory”

is to journey “to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” If we remember this, nothing of ours can ever be lost in a fire.

The seeming paradox is that continuity, eternity, and endlessness hold the center of African philosophy and cosmology, and yet this is not achieved through material being. Our African cosmologies and philosophies hold that though they are deeply connected, we cannot mistake material being for spiritual or historical being.

Where is our humility before the cosmos, nature, and time?

Let us set fire to the Western obsession with the historical archive as material presence and permanence – the conquest of cosmos, time, and nature. Let us re-member and re-imagine the historical archive beyond materiality.

Living in rhythm with the cosmos demands humility before the elements, no longer imagined as forces of material destruction, but as forces of spiritual renewal: water as re-memory, fire as re-generation.

Let us set fire to the future, and flood the world as bodies of water do.

Ukutshisa: to renounce actual being for historical being and preserve the ontological totality of our people.

Ukukhumbula: to remember our historical being.

Tshisani. Khumbulani. Renounce our material being. Re-member our historical being.

I am grateful to the historian Pathisa Nyathi for our discussion on the burning of koBulawayo in 1881 and 1893. This discussion and his vast body of scholarship on African philosophy and cosmology have been invaluable.

1 Henri Depelchin and Charles Croonenberghs, “Gubuluwayo, Aug. 28, 1881”; “Gubuluwayo, Sep. 20, 1881,” Diaries of the Jesuit Missionaries at Bulawayo 1879-1881. Salisbury: The Rhodesiana Society, 1959, pp.80-81.

2 Pathisa Nyathi, Continuity, Endlessness and Eternity: Keynote Address at the International Conference on Communication and Information Science, Sep. 2018. Available at: www.culturefund.org.zw/post/continuity-endlessness-andeternity. Accessed in: 2025.

3 Henri Depelchin and Charles Croonenberghs, op.cit.

4 Pathisa Nyathi, “Chief Sivalo Installed: A Long Established Link with the Ndebele Royalty.” Sunday News, Nov. 26, 2016. Available at: www.pressreader.com/zimbabwe/sunday-news-zimb abwe/20161120/281659664632979. Accessed in: 2025.

5 Alexander Davis (ed.), The Directory of Bulawayo and Handbook to Matabeleland, 1895-1896. Bulawayo: Books of Zimbabwe, 1981, p.14.

6 Frederick Burnham Russell, Scouting on Two Continents. London: Willian Heinemann, 1927, p.144.

7 Id. ibid, p.152.

8 “Killed the Matabele God: Burnham, the American Scout, May End Uprising,” New York Times, Jun. 25, 1896. Available at: timesmachine.nytimes.com/ timesmachine/1896/06/25/108240032.pdf. Accessed in: 2025.

9 Following on from Frank B Wilderson III’s argument that anti-Black violence is necessary for the psychic health of the world as articulated in his memoir (Afropessimism. New York: Liveright, 2020).

10 See “The University of Cape Town’s African Studies Library, Ravaged by Wildfire, Needs Your Help.” Available at: lithub. com/the-university-of-cape-towns-african-studies-libraryravaged-by-wildfire-needs-your-help/. Accessed in: 2025.

11 Pathisa Nyathi, op.cit.

12 John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books, 1970.

13 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.

Provisional Landscapes

Thiago de Paula Souza

This essay seeks to bring together some of the concerns I had when I was invited to be co-curator of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo and during the unfolding of its process of conceptualization, preparation, and execution. Here, I seek to understand and recall some of the insights that helped me navigate these months of intense collaboration. In addition, other thoughts that helped guide the conceptual team are present in essays in this reader, which relate the curatorial concept to different fields of knowledge. It is launched in the context of the four volumes of this Bienal’s educational publication – which deal with issues raised in the four Invocations1 – and also alongside the opening of the exhibition and the launch of its catalog, with essays that focus on each artist and their practices. The clues in this book can help us find, in some way, the multiple worlds inhabited by humanity and how artistic practices relate to them.

I. Synthesis and Listening

Sitting on a wooden bench, facing her laptop, Simnikiwe Buhlungu introduces herself and begins reading the article she has prepared. On the TV next to her, we see a silent looped clip from the 2012 documentary Growing in Music. 2 The film is subtitled and shows a child being encouraged to repeat the singing of an adult woman, as a kind of musical education.3 The girl seems a little shy and may not understand the meaning of the verses, but she accepts the challenge and sings them. At the same time, Buhlungu presses play, and for a few seconds we hear the repetitive beats and melancholic bass line of “Can You Feel It,” 4 a 1980s dance floor hit. The video loops; Buhlungu remains silent and turns up the volume. Now we hear a swarm of bees, and as Simnikiwe speaks again, the volume is gradually reduced. As a storyteller, she brings together the Chicago Black electronic music scene in the 1980s, the polyphony of bees’ zigzagging dance,5 wedding parties in South Africa, and the musical teachings of a family of griots.

The film continues on a loop, but now with the audio turned up. Those scenes, repeated countless times, take on new meaning: we finally hear their voices. With varying intonations, the mother firmly guides her daughter on the correct tone of the verses so that she not only masters the song, but understands its deeper meaning. That song transcends entertainment: it is a gesture of

preserving a family history, of safeguarding the cultural memory of a people, passed down from generation to generation.

In her presentation at the first Invocations meeting, Buhlungu drew a parallel between the processes of synthesis, repetition (looping), and changes in intonation, relating them to ways of preserving the memory and culture of communities or historical periods. She traces a narrative arc that connects sound, history, politics, and nature, relating sound synthesis – a recurring procedure in music production – to other forms of synthesis, such as biological, chemical, and sociocultural. In this way, she outlines a relationship between the various processes of “synthesizing”:

1. artificial ones, made by electronic devices, like synthesizers in music production;

2. those made by living organisms, like honey production by bees or photosynthesis by plants; and

3. festivals, ceremonies, study groups, and conferences.

Her analogy between synthesis in a more social sense, as in celebrations, and synthesis achieved through music production techniques, generated by the manipulation of electronic waves, positions sound, through song, poetry, and rhythm, as a fundamental tool for learning and sustaining communal ties between the past, the present, and the future.

The notion of synthesis is linked to forms of sustaining life. Its use – in a literal, fictional, and/or figurative sense – can function as a relational element between humans, electronic devices, and other living organisms, in addition to offering an appealing image for the articulation of artistic or curatorial thought.

II. From the Uncanny to the Estuary

When I received Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s invitation to join the team for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, I was still involved in the preparation of the 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art: A Thousand Degrees. 6 Focusing on issues of social and material transformation, I wrote that:

we chose heat in its various forms as a conceptual hook and directed our imagination toward reflections on how this element, present in numerous creation myths across different societies, has enabled new understandings of time and space, reorganized life and death cycles, and transformed scientific paradigms.7

As the name suggests, the main objective of Panorama is to present a snapshot of contemporary art in Brazil. The choice of heat as a conceptual key was a way of touching on the political issues that permeated the debates of the local contemporary art scene8 and that are mobilized with each new edition of the exhibition. It seemed narrow-minded to link artistic practices to any idea of nationality. We were not interested in thinking about the nation-state, but rather about territories. It is undeniable that there is a certain imaginary that emphasizes the notion of heat as deeply associated with Brazil – from flirting to religious fervor, the element intersects ecological and social issues and a whole set of cultural and media symbols that shape the country. Thus, the curatorial appropriation of the meaning of this element, that is, an exhibition interested in the transformation of energy between different bodies or systems, would be a concept capable of guiding the project without it being captured by the demands of the circuit.

This digression served to situate what my thinking was when I received Ndikung’s invitation. The central idea that would guide the construction of the exhibition emerged from the first version of his proposal. The original project, structured in three segments,9 was used as the basis for a very broad and sincere theme: a reflection on humanity as something to be constantly exercised. It is important to highlight that Ndikung’s initial proposal, as well as the development of what would become our curatorial project, was not based on an obsolete version of the human figure – one that establishes Man (white, rich, straight) as representative of the species – much less on an idyllic and uncontradictory view of human experience. There is no uncritical exaltation or positivization of human existence. The project insists on listening as a fundamental practice for maintaining and sustaining life. It suggests that different artistic practices can operate as a call for us to ponder new meanings for humanity.

My contribution as co-curator was a gradual process of maturation and continuous adjustments over several months. Initially, I needed to accurately analyze how my perspective would dialogue with a collective curatorial project – it was not just a matter of adding ideas, but of synthesizing a view that would complement its conceptual foundations.

Developing an exhibition that aims to discuss humanity’s response to the precariousness of the times we live in initially made me very wary about the contribution that artistic practices can make to changing, shaping, or at least fostering political imaginaries. I was eager to understand how we would structure the mutual intertwining of art and politics in the face of escalating violence and social instability around the world. Also, my central concern lay within a few questions: How can I relate my interest in artists working with processes of material metabolism to processes of social, political, and human synthesis? What real contribution can a discussion on the humanities make in the present without reducing it to illustration? How can we approach this discussion in a cohesive manner, without resorting to a totalizing unity? What is the place of deviation in our project?

I found crucial inspiration in reading Joshua ChambersLetson’s essay “It Is We Who Are the Function,”10 a text that offers a unique key to rethinking the role of artistic practices in the construction of radical political imaginaries. In one passage, the author argues that “humanistic inquiry aligned with the minor and engaging the aesthetic might still play an irruptive role in the reshaping of our many beleaguered and interconnected worlds.” And he goes on, drawing parallels between the works of Sylvia Wynter and Kandice Chuh:11

I have returned our attention to Wynter’s and Chuh’s shared interest in a heretical humanism that might surface “after Man” as I attempt to form language from within our latest existential crisis. This is a crisis not just for the humanities but for the very form of “human beingness,” described by Chuh as a “constitutive relationality,” just as it is a crisis for the planet as the orders of Man have brought us to the brink of military and ecological self-annihilation.

According to the author, “aesthetics, and aesthetic practices that emerge especially from a minoritarian vantage, once more play a key role in this movement.”

The proposal in Chambers-Letson’s text – which echoes and expands on Wynter and Chuh’s ideas questioning the Western notion of Man as the universal center – added to Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s lecture/storytelling and led me back to reading Conceição Evaristo’s poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence]. This re-reading accessed a place I had already left behind. While the subtitle of this edition of the Bienal (Of Humanity as Practice) is an explicit statement of the intentions of the curatorial research, with positive transparency, the title, based on Evaristo’s verses, introduces deliberate opacity: Not All Travellers Walk Roads. If the subtitle affirms, poetry carries more nuances – and it is in this interstice that it offers what is most interesting. Carrying on with Evaristo’s verses, the obscure and “submerged worlds” that only “the silence of poetry penetrates” can be foul, obtuse, and stubborn. The sounds of these enigmatic landscapes through which this traveler circulates can be unpleasant, presenting realities of violence, exclusion, and silencing. Those who live in them may not fit in, may be overcome by anxiety and fear of the unknown or of that which is strange to them.

This notion was the driving force behind Invocation #4, whose central theme was the “uncanny valley.” This reflection was proposed by the robotics engineer Masahiro Mori, who, in the 1970s, researched Japanese society’s discomfort with technological advancement – in particular, the public’s reaction to the introduction of robots and androids into everyday contexts. To analyze how these figures were perceived, Mori used a graph to illustrate the relationship between the humanization of machines and social acceptance. The closer they were to human appearance, the greater the acceptance, up to a critical point where the similarity became disturbing. This phenomenon not only captured the anxieties of its time, but also served as a reference point for our curatorship, which sought to explore how technology still evokes fascination and revulsion today, an issue that is even more present with the development of language-related artificial intelligence.

In our research, we set out from the references cited by Mori – such as Noh theater and Bunraku (traditional Japanese puppet theater) – but Andrew Maerkle observed that “poetry gradually emerged as a more vital mode of expression, articulating the past and present in Japan.”12 I agree with him that from the classical forms of Noh to contemporary hip-hop, poetry has proved to be a

common thread for discussing cultural responses to technology. If the “uncanny valley” alerted us to the risks of artificial humanization, poetry offered a counterpoint: a language capable of translating paradoxes, where tradition and innovation coexist without erasing their tensions. Far from being an impasse, this tension becomes an ode to difference, recognizing that the world is woven from distinct infrastructures – mental, aesthetic, ethical. It is in this paradox that the metaphor of the estuary has been strengthened: just as rivers and the sea coexist without merging, human coexistence does not require uniformity, only the need to navigate contradictions.13

In retrospect, this curatorial image was constructed through a combination of different estuaries we visited during the Invocations or research trips: Tokyo Bay, where for over a thousand years shiohigari (shellfish harvesting) has been one of the favorite activities of those who visit or live there; the estuaries on the coast of São Paulo, one of the world’s most microplastic-contaminated places; the Oiapoque River estuary in Amapá, on the border between Brazil and French Guiana, a region where organized crime, mineral extraction, and migratory flows coexist with the exuberance of the forest; the Anil River estuary in Maranhão, where capoeira groups and bumba-meu-boi festivities remind us that life goes on beyond the pettiness of those in power, and where reggae parties14 prove that dancing close together is the way to go. It would be impossible not to mention Recife’s Capibaribe estuary, which, in the 1990s, amid social and environmental chaos, between guitars and drums, showed the world a new cultural scene that had developed on its banks. Even if only temporarily, it illustrated a new perspective of coexistence mediated by music and mud, by dreams of the future and chaos.

Estuaries are temporary aquatic environments, provisional landscapes where countless species coexist, and perhaps therein lies the main element that this metaphor offers us: an exhibition such as the Bienal de São Paulo is the collective construction of a provisional landscape, a backdrop for the global contemporary art scene. A fold where Tokyo Bay meets the Capibaribe River, where different audiences coexist. Thus, this figure offers us a curatorial element, a tool that goes beyond the cultural and historical. It does not deny the culture or history of the human populations that surround it, but invites us to listen to the planet and its sounds in other ways. They are places of transition, inviting us to think and create from

the interdependence and coexistence between different worlds. With Brazil as its starting point, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo traces a temporary landscape, built on proximity and complicity, to think of humanity as a continuous exercise, a violent but sublime practice, full of questions. The main one is: How can a contemporary art exhibition offer tools for us to exercise humanity?

III. Notes on the Architecture

Throughout the months of preparation for the exhibition, the image of submerged worlds, with their sinuous forms and hidden landscapes, became a constant presence in our dialogues. The metaphor of the pavilion-estuary synthesizes, in the exhibition space, the curatorial concept. This image guided spatial decisions from the outset: we chose to build as few walls or rooms as possible, prioritizing the integrity of the existing structures and the natural light that bathes them. We focused on working with perspectives of vertical and horizontal interconnection in the Pavilion, whether through the presentation of works with vertical dimensions or architectural constructions.

Several works by participating artists are not presented in a single group or position, but are spread out across different locations in the building, creating diverse indexes. Undoubtedly, the most striking feature used in the exhibition design are the textile structures installed on all floors of the Pavilion. They create not only new paths within the exhibition, with their different colors and transparencies, but also new perspectives of relationship with the space.

On the lower floor, shades of blue predominate; on the second floor, greens; and on the third, earth tones, combined with warmer shades such as red and orange. With the construction of rooms on the sides of the building, always close to the glass frames, large areas were created in the center of the second and third floors, so that the Pavilion is freer for both public traffic and the positioning of the works. When visitors enter the rooms, they feel like they are walking toward the park landscape.

The panels, always positioned between columns, function as temporary displays, arising to support two-dimensional works. Eventually, to accommodate works by artists who need larger supports, other types of displays were created, such as the walls that envelop the staircases and extend along two floors. To give the

Pavilion a vertical effect, these walls, as well as those at the head of the building – both the one related to the access ramp and the one on the opposite side – were painted with different colors that run through all the floors.

1 The Invocations reflect a line of curatorial programs that sought to redefine the possibilities of exhibitions and curatorial practice. This trajectory includes initiatives such as Platforms – launched by Okwui Enwezor and his team for Documenta 11 (2002) – which expanded the discursive and geopolitical scope of large-scale exhibitions. Since 2009, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and collaborators have organized Invocations through SAVVY Contemporary – The Laboratory of Form-Ideas in Berlin, while also incorporating the series into international contexts such as Sonsbeek (Arnhem), Bamako Encounters Biennale, and the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In preparation for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, four editions of Invocations were organized, in Marrakech, Guadeloupe, Zanzibar, and Tokyo.

2 The documentary investigates how children from different cultures learn their first musical lessons with their families.

3 The excerpt presented by Buhlungu shows families of jeli or griots from Mali in moments of celebration, casual encounters in which oral and musical tradition is passed down between generations.

4 “Can You Feel It,” released in 1986 by Larry Heard (under the pseudonym Mr. Fingers), is one of the fundamental pillars of house music, also considered a milestone in the Chicago electronic scene and 20th-century Black cultural production. The bass line was produced with a Roland Juno-60 analog synthesizer.

5 From “waggle dance.” It is a communication system used by bees that intertwines movement, sound, and biochemistry, with the main objective of synthesizing honey.

6 The 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art: A Thousand Degrees (2024), curated by Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza, and Ariana Nuala, is part of the Panorama da Arte Brasileira series, which began in 1969 at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM).

7 Thiago de Paula Souza, “Thousand Degree,” in Germano Dushá and Thiago de Paula Souza (eds.), 38º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Mil graus. São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2024, p.341. Available at: https://mam.org.br/wp-content/ uploads/2025/02/38panorama-catalogo-digital-241212-final.pdf. Accessed in: 2025.

8 We chose not to address subjectivities, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity as a central element of the curatorial concept. Not because we disbelieve in the contribution of exhibitions to the

reorganization of political imaginaries, but because we are convinced that, in that context, it was imperative that exhibition proposals attempted to escape the debate that seemed to have been co-opted by the neoliberal ethos. In A plantação cognitiva [The Cognitive Plantation] (2020), artist and writer Jota Mombaça offers a beautiful reflection on the process of capturing subalternized artistic practices.

9 These three segments have been expanded into six chapters that structure the exhibition space: on the ground floor, Chapter 1 – Frequencies of Landings and Belongings; on the first floor, Chapter 2 – Grammars of Defiances; on the second floor, Chapter 3 – Of Spatial Rhythms and Narrations and Chapter 4 –Currents of Nurturing and Plural Cosmologies; on the third floor, Chapter 5 – Cadences of Transformation and Chapter 6 – The Intractable Beauty of the World.

10 Chambers-Letson’s essay was commissioned for this reader. The author draws on his reading of the text “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism,” written in 1984 by the Black feminist author, critic, and theorist Sylvia Wynter. In it, Wynter discusses the need to overcome modern humanism and seek new ways of defining human identity through ritual practices and a renewed understanding of individual agency. She argues that humanism, as we know it, is limited and that it is necessary to find a new “ceremony” that allows us to understand both Western and secular categories. Thus, she proposes a reconfiguration of the concept of humanity for the two traditional paradigms.

11 He refers to the already mentioned essay “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism,” by Wynter (boundary 2, v.12, n.3, spring-fall 1984), and to Chuh’s book The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

12 See Bukimi No Tani (不気味の谷): The Uncanny Valey –The Affectivity of the Humanoid, educational publication vol. 4.

13 In this proposal, the physical and philosophical space of the estuary is used as a metaphor for spaces of encounter, negotiations, exchange, living, survival, nourishment, struggle, despair, repair, rehabilitation, needs... Spaces in which the practices of humanity could acquire new meanings.

14 An Afro-diasporic, traveling rhythm that arrived in São Luís through the reception of sound waves from Caribbean radio stations, and which acquired a local accent and rhythm.

The Submerged Worlds That Only the

Silence of Poetry Penetrates

Conjugating the H-U-M-A-N

Bonaventure Soh

Bejeng Ndikung

This being human is a guest house. Each morning brings a new visitor.

A joy, a sadness, a small cruelty, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and host them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who storm through your home empty of its furniture, still, receive each guest honorably. They may be clearing you out for some new delight.

Excerpt from “The Guest House,” by Rumi

For too many of us, this world has never really been a safe place. And it is not the fault of the world per se, but actually of a specific kind of occupant that has taken upon itself the right to systematically destroy its host, its kind, its neighbours, and others: the human being.

I stepped into an Uber this morning with a gentle but talkative Chechen driver, Deni, who felt the urge to recount to me the news of the past night. He told me Iran had been attacked overnight by Israel and he was very sure Iran was going to reply with a nuclear bomb. The trip to the airport, mentally, became a very long and triste one, but at the same time very contemplative and informative. The driver spoke of the Chechen war, and the current massacre going on in Gaza, he spoke of the war in Congo and the millions of people killed over the years, as much as of Sudan, and, to my surprise, he also mentioned the war in Ethiopia. My surprise was choked by sadness, as, like me, he pondered the fate of all those innocent children starved and killed in open air prisons. I asked him if he had ever heard of the war in the anglophone part of Cameroon, where I am from. He said no, and when I told him that my parents were forced to become refugees in their seventies, I could feel and see tears swell in his eyes. Then, in what felt like a sudden twist of the conversation, he said he loved watching animal shows on TV. In one of the documentaries, the reporter had spoken about rich

Europeans and Americans, some of them from royal families, who flew regularly to different parts of the African continent for hunting. They would kill lions and elephants and other majestic animals just for the sake of it. I could feel the disgust ooze out of his every tissue, organ, and cell. Then he mentioned that if a lion was full and a deer passed by, the lion would ignore its presence, and went on to further lament the human being’s tendency to kill, just for killing’s sake and the sake of power.

When he dropped me off at the airport, I thought of the great Sufi mystic Rumi’s poem “The Guest House”, in which he says being human is like a guest house that receives good guests, like joy, and not so good guests, like depression and sorrow. Rumi encourages us to treat each guest honorably, as even the bad guests might “be clearing you out/ for some new delight.” But I had to think of all the wars and famines, the genocides and massacres, the starving children from Gaza through Goma and Bamenda and Sahrawi to Naypyidaw, all the ecological disasters and migration urgencies – migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean sea and others trying to cross the Rio Grande or the American border, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is ravaging the USA deporting immigrants –, all the dictators and other dehumanizers across the globe today, all the economic and social issues, and I was hard pressed to understand what was actually being cleared out, and what possible new delight lay ahead. What new delight can one possibly see behind the explosion of a nuclear bomb? What delight?

This is where I find myself as I still dare to conjugate humanity, as a hopeless optimist in these seemingly bleak times.

But we do not have the privilege to be dismayed.

Art gives us the possibilities, the sensibilities, and tools to reconsider the world in which we find ourselves, even in times when the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel seems so far away and the tunnel so dark. Even in these times, when it seems like humanity has given up faith in the human project. Even in these times, when hope is scarce to find, and vendors of hopeless hope parade on our TVs, social media, radios, and streets. Even in these times, in which we find more humanity in certain animals than in human beings. And especially in such times, we need artists and art that help us see clearly through the fog, help us listen through the noises, help us reason through the brain clog, and help us expand our imaginaries of what humanity could actually be.

And that is what the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, with the title Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, is actually about. This title, borrowed from Conceição Evaristo’s poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence], demands of us that we question this road on which humanity has set its journey. A journey of threatening each other with nuclear weapons, a journey of starvation as a tool of power and warfare, a journey of economic and political machinations that keep the rest of the world hungry, while we have so much grain stacked up in silos across the globe waiting for prices to skyrocket, a journey of engineered poverty and homelessness in some of the richest countries in the world, a journey of colonialism and enslavement of other human beings. So the question we are posing is: what other paths can be taken in this life-journey of ours if we negate the toxic, white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, and colonialist roads that have been imposed upon us since time immemorial?

Conceição Evaristo answers the question in the final line of her poem when she writes that “there are submerged worlds/ that only the silence/ of poetry penetrates.”

So this Bienal de São Paulo has been an invitation to artists, scholars, and people from all walks of life to imagine those submerged worlds, to give us clues on the poetries and their silences that are the keys to these submerged worlds, and maybe through fabulations, to offer us recipes and menus to cook the dishes for those submerged worlds. I was intrigued by the fact that Evaristo didn’t reduce it to a singular world. No universalism a la renaissance, with the imposition of western cultures and notions of humanity upon the whole world in a time when more than half of the world wasn’t considered human enough. No. Rather, an imagination of plural worlds in which we can all exercise our common humanities differently.

These paths that are not roads of dehumanization that we have taken for the Bienal de São Paulo are paths paved by the intractable beauty of the world and of humanity. Because to insist on beauty and on joy in the face of the most utter ugliness of dehumanization we see across the globe today is to insist on humanity and to resist dehumanization. I am not talking of the kind of beauty of reality shows that produced such beings like Donald Trump, but the kind of beauty formulated by Ben Okri in his “Musings on Beauty” when he writes that:

Beauty is embraced truly by the soul. It has its roots deep in the subconscious. Its appeal is from deep down, in the hidden archetypes and the fundamental forms and the myths within that are but echoes of the stars. Beauty is our sense of the mysteries of the universe. Beauty is always mysterious, because its true source is beyond reason. It belongs to higher causes rather than effects. But it is the effect of the higher origins of beauty’s mystery that we experience as its reality […]

The beauty of surfaces and the beauty of depths. Beauty in ugliness. Beauty in how time resolves evil. Beauty in birth and beauty in death. Beauty in the ordinary. Beauty in memory, in fading things, in forms perceived and not perceived. Beauty in awkward, unfinished, ruined, broken things. Beauty in creation and in destruction. Beauty in time and in timelessness. Beauty in the infinite that encompasses all, before the beginning and beyond the end.1

In a time in which people have chosen weapons of mass destruction as the sole means to assert their presence in the world, we have chosen the uncompromising power of Okri-lian beauty as our means to assert humanity and its possible futures. In a time in which apocalypse is written large and bold, we have chosen the vulnerability of daring to conjugate humanity as a verb.

Growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s in Bamenda, Cameroon, radio became our portal to the world. It was on the radio that we listened to the commentary of the World Cup in Mexico in 1986 and in Italy in 1990. It was on radio that we heard about Thomas Sankara’s assassination, it was on radio that we learned of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison after serving for 27 years, it was on radio that we, unconventionally, listened to music all day long on April 6th, 1984, upon the failed coup d’etat against the Cameroonian president, which ended up being his excuse for staying in power for 43 years. But it was also on the radio that we listened to Ottawan sing D-I-S-C-O2 and Nat King Cole’s L-O-V-E 3 blasting across the ether.

It is from there that the format of the lettered conjugation, as I have come to call it, has fascinated me. DISCO couldn’t just be disco. For Abba it had to be D – desirable, I – irresistible, S – super sexy, C – complicated, O – ooooooohhh.

This lettered conjugation combined with Binyavanga Wainaina’s numbered essays are inspirations for this methodology of unpacking and conjugating humanity: H – humility, U – understanding, M – multiplicity, A – abundance, N – nature.

Anecdotes on the H-U-M-A-N

H – Humility

I stir a glass bottle filled with glass beads and remember your lesson: to leave a flaw, a bead to break the pattern, to free the maker. Not an error but humility: We are not gods.

Excerpt from “Is It Beauty That We Owe?,”

by Janice N. Harrington4

Read the full poem at

Maybe to be human is to first and foremost accept that we are not gods. We are not Orishas. All our efforts of terraforming, making humanoids with the aim of replacing humans, stopping ageing processes, eliminating death by cryonics, colonizing the moon and much more are manifestations of humanity’s hubris.

As the world is pushed to the edge of another world war, with some countries flexing their nuclear muscles and playing God, we must finally recognize that to dehumanize others you must first dehumanize yourself – and in the process of dehumanizing others you dehumanize yourself even more. No empire lives forever. As the great empires of the past have fallen, so too will the current reigns of the US empire, and its associates that we all know, fall one day too. And speaking of falling, as the saying goes: “Pride comes before the fall.” So what else but humility? To be human is to be humble in front of the cosmic powers that surround and guide us. To be human is to be humble in front of the plurality of beings that inhabit this earth with us. To be is not synonymous with liveness in our understanding of anima, but to be is to exist. Which is to say with being, we mean to exist animately and inanimately. To be human means thus to co-exist without the urge of creating hierarchies of power and without the urge to denigrate other beings. To be humble is to accept that vulnerability is actually strength. To be humble is

to restrain from the “Christopher Columbus” complex of wanting to think that everything you find is yours and that you were the first to “discover.” To exercise humility, which means to be human, is to acknowledge that your humanity is contingent on mine and mine on yours. I would like to call this practice of humanity the “politics of humility.” Humility stems from the ground, the soil, from humus (earth), as “humility” comes from the Latin noun humilitas, or the adjective humilis, which signifies to be “humble,” to be “grounded,” or to be “earthed.” How do we unassume and unlearn the violent claims of domination over others? How do we unassume and unlearn the colonial urges of supremacy? How do we unassume and unlearn the estimations of humanity which impose impropriety and indecency above decency, truth, care, harmony, and respect?

U – Understanding

the copy editor means well the copy editor means

she is only fluent in one language of gestures i do not explain

i feel sad for her

limited understanding of greetings              & maybe this is why my acknowledgements are so long;

didn’t we learn this early? to look at white spaces

& find the color thank god o thank god for you are here.

Excerpt from “Ode to the Head Nod,” by Elizabeth Acevedo5 Read the full poem at

Walking the streets of Berlin, London, New York, Salvador, São Paulo, or some other place, I come across people who, without a

sense of hesitation, look straight to my face, almost as if seeing through me, and un-suddenly perform a gesture too familiar to me but which still takes my breath away every single time. The posture, the look, the recognition, the affirmation, and then, the (head) nod. All in just a split second. While this gesture comes from a wide range of people from across the globe, it most especially happens with Black people of varying shades and political stances. That nod is maybe the most sophisticated acknowledgement of the fact that one is being seen. Not the seeing limited to the primitiveness of the eye’s visual capacity, but the kind of seeing that means hearing, feeling, smelling, as well as recognizing and appreciating your presence. The head nod as a gesture that could be decoded as “I understand you and what you are or might be going through” or “I recognize your humanity.” The nod, thus, as a gesture of understanding best understood as “overstanding,” if we employ the philosophies of our Caribbean siblings of the Rastafari movement who have the tendency of inverting everything as a means of subverting the world in which we find ourselves through their Iyaric or Dread Talk. For example, in the alteration of vocabulary, like over-standing instead of understanding, downpression or downpressor instead of oppression or oppressor, outvention instead of invention, livication instead of dedication (as the first syllable of “dedicate” sounds like “death” and should be replaced by “life” as in livicate). But I digress.

The point being made is that to be human is to be understanding. Understanding as a form of empathy. To be able to see each other’s wounds and joy properly, and feel each other’s pain and celebrate each other’s elation. To be human is to be able to understand the pain of the parents who have lost their children, and wives who have lost their husbands and vice versa, and children who have lost their parents in Bamenda, Gaza, Goma, Haifa, Kano, Khartum, Naypyidaw, Tehran, etc., as your pain. To be human is to overcome being indifferent toward the plights of others and to empathize and understand their causes.

One of the most enigmatic words in Cameroonian pidgin is the word “ashia.” It is indeed more than just a word. It is a philosophy. A Weltanschauung. When someone is in pain, has lost someone, is going through a situation, you say “ashia” to that person. When someone works too hard, you say “ashia for work.” Sometimes, when you encounter a person, especially one older than you, on the street or wherever, your expression of recognition and

solidarity toward the person is expressed by saying “ashia.” A greeting, a nod, a recognition, an acknowledgement, a gesture of understanding. To express “ashia” is a foundational act of understanding what it means to be human.

M – Multiplicity

If we stand together, must unity resolve the multiplicity of our infinite fracture? What proportion is each figure?

When we go together, what is the simple form we make?

Excerpt from “What Draws Us Together,” by

Harryette Mullen6

Read the full poem at

It is a fallacy to think that unity means sameness, oneness, or other simplistic notions of common identity. A common denominator might be flanked by a vastness of differences. But it is that common denominator, humanity, that holds us indivisibly with each other. It is our differences and multiplicities that actually define us as human: the different languages we speak, the multiple ways and foods we eat, the different cultures, sciences, religions, and philosophies we have cultivated to suit our being in this world. It is this multifacetedness that emerges from our different weathers and climates, different biospheres in which we were born and grew up, different tools and utensils with which we were socialized, varying notions of education and care that actually defines our humanities. In its pluriversality, humanity is not one key that fits one lock, but many keys that fit many locks that open the same door to dignity and respect, love and grace. In his book Aspects de la civilisation africaine” [Aspects of African Civilization],7 Amadou Hampâté Bâ reflects on the notions of “Person” and “Personhood” in Bambara and Peul cosmogony when he writes:

Tradition teaches that initially there is Maa, the person-receptacle, then Maaya, i.e. the various aspects of Maa contained in the Maa-receptacle. As the Bambara expression says: “Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono” (The

persons of the person are multiple in the person.) One finds exactly the same notion among the Fulani. The concept of the person is thus, from the outset, very complex. It implies an interior multiplicity – concentric or superimposed planes of existence (physical, psychological and spiritual at various levels) as well as a constant dynamism.8

With this, Hampaté Ba adds to the outer multiplicity of humanity the dimension of inner multiplicity, as he discusses notions of personhood that constantly reveal our multiplicities of beings, even though societies might aim at suffocating that multiplicity. To be human is to embrace our inner and outer multiplicity.

A – Abundance

Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless waste we make when we create – our streets teem with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is a purpose, maybe there are too many of us to see it, though we can, from a distance, hear the dull thrum of generation’s industry, feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder. Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

Excerpt from “Life is Beautiful,” by

Dorianne Laux9

Read the full poem at

Our age is most characterized by the politics of scarcity and rationing, although we are blessed with the spirit of abundance. To make humans act worse than crabs in a bucket, one must give them the impression that there is just too little for all of us. One must give people the impression that if migrants come into your country, and take away your jobs and your men and women, and take all the money from doing mean jobs, then there will be no money left for the citizens of that country. To control and contain humans, one must give them the impression that their very fertile

lands are actually barren, and that all the milk that they get from their cattle is not healthy enough, or that breast milk is not healthy for their children, and that therefore they need to buy chemically modified powder milk from multinational food companies. To put people in mental chains, one should give them the impression that they need to kill each other to afford the grain to make bread, while there is enough grain stored in silos around the world. To subordinate people, colonize all the water under their grounds and do not give them the chance to tap water naturally, but force them to buy water and make them dependent on this as the only source of clean water.

The politics of scarcity and rationing are at the crux of the politics of dehumanization. To rehumanize is to make people understand that we live in abundance, and that “everywhere the good life oozes from the useless/ waste we make when we create.”

Even in the ruins and debris of our destruction, there is abundance, if we think of wealth beyond the capitalist notion of the term.

The key question is how do we deliver ourselves from the politics of scarcity and rationing imposed on the world by the ever unfolding machinations of the colonial enterprise?

N – Nature a whispering behind the trees, and here beneath the rain-scrubbed sky orange poppies multiply.

Excerpt from “Nature Knows Its Math,” by

Joan Bransfield Graham10

Read the full poem at

The division and battle between nature and culture is one of the key long term projects of the varying forms and shades of the colonial enterprise. The idea of the “mission civilisatrice” was to bring

“culture” to those in “nature.” A part of the world had the hubris to think that its way of being in the world was cultured and civilized, while others were stuck in what they derogatorily called nature. To be on the side of nature meant, from the point of view of the West toward the non-West, to be savage. This constructed narrative was the excuse to enslave and dehumanize people, to colonize them, destroy their education systems, destroy their religions, dismantle their senses of history and belonging through the so-called project of modernization. So, the imposition of the monocultural plantation economic system – that we now know is largely responsible for the destruction not only of our environments but also world economic structures – was considered cultured, while polyculture, in which multiple plant types were planted and supported each other in their growth, was considered abject nature.

My family lived in a house in the town of Bamenda in Cameroon. Around the house, my parents had cultivated a creole garden. My father had planted papaya and avocado trees, five different types of mango trees, and banana and plantain as well as guava trees, while my mother and grandmother planted corn, beans, cabbages, leaks, and other vegetables on a seasonal basis. Around these gardens there were always chickens and sometimes goats running around. My parents were no hippies or anything of the sort. But when it came to food, they believed that it was important to know how it was planted and by whom, if fertilizers were used and, if so, exactly which ones, etc. This was important in a context of mass plantations with vast usage of toxic imported fertilizers. On a daily basis, we could experience the process of planting, germinating, growing, weeding, harvesting, and eventually the transforming of, for example, corn to fufu. Common sense would state that this creole garden my parents made, reflective of the plurality of natural bushes and forests, is more appropriate than a plantation, that is the epitome of what colonial culture and universalism stand for. For plantations to be made, forests and bushes, or other forms of nature, have to be destroyed. It is said that one of the reasons why covid-19 ravaged the world a few years ago was because of the human being’s consistent destruction of the habitat of other beings. Might the imposition of culture upon nature thus be detrimental to the existence of the human being?

Despite all efforts by humans trying to place themselves above “nature,” by claiming a certain notion of culture that is hierarchically above nature, essentially humans are just part of nature.

This is to say that humans can only thrive if they have respect for all other beings that inhabit that space called nature. In that space, all beings deserve their place, all beings are interconnected with each other. As Joan Bransfield Graham points out, “Nature Knows Its Math.” Part of nature’s math is that if humans cause inequality or unbalance in the equation of nature, not only will many other beings suffer or even be exterminated, but also humanity will suffer, and maybe even the most.

To keep nature’s mathematical equation in balance, humanity must get out and down from its ivory tower and work toward existing in harmony with its kind and other kinds.

These might be some of many ways of conjugating humanity. Humans are not perfect. But to be human is not a passive practice, but rather an active one. To be human is to wake up every morning and ask yourself: How do I conjugate my humanity in relation to myself and others today? Humans are not perfect. But to be human is to actively put altruism, beauty, compassion, joy, love, resilience, togetherness, and vision into practice.

As the world stands at the verge of maybe another world war or maybe a nuclear clash, I remember that compassionate voice of the talkative Chechen driver, Deni, who upon departure looked at me straight in the eye as if he could see the back of my brain, and said: “Brother, keep the faith. We don’t have a choice but to drive humanity to a better place. If not for us, then for our children’s children.” And to that I responded: “Aameen!”

1 Ben Okri, “Musings on Beauty,” in A Time for New Dreams. London: Rider, 2011.

2 Available at: youtu.be/O0ces1RYmVE?si=FiXiQl1ur2G-fwi0. Accessed in: 2025.

3 Available at: youtu.be/gZYtes1RO_w?si=LS88OrxM_ LEXP8Fh. Accessed in: 2025.

4 Available at: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ poems/160265/is-it-beauty-that-we-owe. Accessed in: 2025.

5 Available at: . Accessed in: 2025.

6 Available at: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ poems/1615042/what-draws-us-together. Accessed in: 2025.

7 Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Aspects de la civilisation africaine. Paris: Éditions Presence Africaine, 1972.

8 Translated from the French by Susan B. Hunt.

9 Available at: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58278/ life-is-beautiful. Accessed in: 2025.

10 Available at: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58838/ nature-knows-its-math. Accessed in: 2025.

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36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All

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Bienal de São Paulo

Published in Portuguese and English by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

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Ipsis

ISBN 978-85-85298-95-1

The title of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Not All Travellers Walk Roads, is based on verses by writer Conceição Evaristo.

© Publication Copyright:

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sion in case it comes to our knowledge.

All essays and poems were commissioned by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, except for those that mention other editions.

This book was published in Portuguese and English in August 2025, as part of the project of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo.

Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP) (Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brasil)

36th Bienal de São Paulo : not all travellers walk roads : of humanity as practice : reader / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo ; curadoria Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. -São Paulo : Bienal de São Paulo, 2025.

Vários autores.

ISBN 978-85-85298-95-1

1. Artes - Exposições - Catálogos

2. Arte - São Paulo (SP) - Exposições

3. Bienal de São Paulo (SP)

I. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

II. Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng.

25-288504 CDD-709.8161

Índices para catálogo sistemático:

1. Bienais de arte : São Paulo: Cidade 709.8161

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