2025 Bienal de São Paulo to Take the Title of ‘Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice’

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the chief curator of 2025 Bienal de São Paulo, has announced the title and curatorial concept of his forthcoming exhibition, sent to open in the Brazilian city next September.

Titled “Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice,” the exhibition draws its name from a line from the poem “Da calma e do silêncio”(Of calm and silence) by Afrobrazilian poet Conceição Evaristo.

In a press release, the curatorial team stated that the biennial’s aim is “to rethink humanity as a verb, a living practice, in a world that requires reimagining relationships, asymmetries and listening as the basis for coexistence, based on three curatorial fragments/axes.”

Those three fragments/axes are centered around the ideas of “claiming space and time” or asking viewers “to slow down and pay attention to details”; inviting “the public to see themselves in the reflection of the other”; and focusing on “spaces of encounters – like estuaries that are spaces of multiple encounters” as a way to think through “coloniality, its power structures and the ramifications thereof in our societies today.”  

“In a time when humans seem to have, again, lost grip on what it means to be human, in a time when humanity seems to be losing the ground under its feet, in a time of aggravated sociopolitical, economic, environmental crisis across the globe, it seems to us urgent to invite artists, scholars, activists, and other cultural practitioners anchored within a wide range of disciplines to join us in rethinking what humanity could mean and conjugating humanity,” Ndikung said in a statement. “Despite or because of all these past-present-future crises and urgencies, we must afford ourselves the privilege of imagining another world through another concept and practice of humanity.”

In April, when Ndikung was named the Bienal’s chief curator, he also announced a curatorial team consisting of co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, and Thiago de Paula Souza, as well as co-curator at large Keyna Eleison and strategy and communication adviser Henriette Gallus.

The Bienal de São Paulo is the second-oldest biennial in the world and frequently focuses on Latin America and its connection to the art world at large. This edition will run four weeks longer than past ones, closing on January 11, 2026, to coincide with the school holidays in Brazil.

“This project not only reaffirms the Bienal’s role as a space for reflection and dialogue on the most pressing issues of our time, but also demonstrates the institutional commitment of the Fundação to promoting artistic practices in a way that is accessible and relevant to diverse audiences,” Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, said in a statement.

Ahead of the Bienal’s opening in September 2025, the curatorial team will organize a series of “Invocations” that will feature panels, poetry, music, performance, and serve as gatherings to further explore the exhibition’s curatorial concept. The first of these will take place November 14–15 in Marrakech, Morocco, and will be titled “Souffles: On Deep Listening and Active Reception”; the second will run December 4–5 in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe, with the title “Bigidi mè pa tonbé!” (Totter, but never fall!). In February 2025, the curatorial team will run an Invocation, “Mawali-Taqsim: Improvisation as a Space and Technology of Humanity” in Zanzibar, as well as one in Japan, “The Uncanny Valley or I’ll Be your Mirror,” in March 2025.

To learn more about the curatorial concept for the 2025 Bienal de São Paulo, ARTnews interviewed Ndikung and the curatorial team by email.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

ARTnews: How did you chose the Bienal’s title, “Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice”? Can you expand on what you mean in wanting the Bienal’s proposal to “rethink humanity as a verb, a living practice”?

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: There are several entry points into this. When I received the call to submit a proposal for the Bienal de São Paulo, I was in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, doing studio visits, seeing exhibitions, giving lectures, and just being amazed about the many possibilities off the beaten track. Not that I don’t know this, but every time, I am so stunned by the depth of knowledges, profundity of practices, and aesthetics that never make it to our so-called “centers”—many of which do not even aspire to [be at the center]. It felt like being on a journey with travelers who had chosen other ways than roads. And this too often is my feeling when I travel in Asia, Africa, and Abya Yala [the Americas] … that I feel drawn into universes that the prescribed road of the universalists, of the bearers of Western epistems, of the academies of this world would never take me to.

I always travel with poetry. It is also a medium that helps me find the paths beyond the prescribed roads. At that time, I was completely engulfed in a poetry collection by Conceição Evaristo, wherein I stumbled on the poem “Da calma e do silêncio!” And the poem hit me like a train. I wanted to read that line “not all travellers walk roads” as an invitation to question all the roads on which we can’t walk, all the “cul de sacs” in which we find ourselves, all the violent roads that we have been forced onto and we are kamikaze-like following. And to me humanity is such a road! Just looking at the world today and all the conflicts and pains, all the despair and failures, all the precarity and dire conditions children, women, men, and others have to face, one must question: “What is wrong with humanity, for God’s sake?”

I have been thinking a lot about the Indonesian poet Rendra (Willibrordus S. Rendra) whose poem “an angry world,” from the late ’50s I believe, comes to my mind almost daily. In the poem he makes a constatation of the many ills of the world and asks the question: “how does the world breathe now?” It is not the world per se that is the problem. It is humanity—and the paths it maneuvered itself onto this failed concept we are all struggling to grasp. But what is that actually? What if we didn’t take the road we are walking for granted? What if we thought of it as a practice? Then how would we conjugate it? We desperately need to relearn to be human! Or we need to come up with other concepts that would help us live better in this world together. And while we are looking for new concepts we have to work with what we have and listen to one another to learn about other possible roads, and maybe things might become better if we perceived it rather as a practice than a substantive—as something given. The proposal for the Bienal comes from a place of unacceptance to despair. It comes from a space of trust that we as humans not only can but must do better. And for that to happen we must get off those violent colonial, dehumanizing, disenfranchising roads on which we are and find other ways! Yes, we must be travelers, but we don’t have to walk those roads.

Can you expand on the significance of “Da calma e do silêncio” to this edition of the Bienal?

Ndikung: The poem comes to an end with these enigmatic lines: “Not all travellers walk roads, there are submerged worlds, that only silence of poetry penetrates.” And this blew my mind. We are interested in doing a biennale that serves as a portal to those submerged worlds that only the silence of poetry penetrates. Paradoxically the poem invites us to dwell in that vast sonic space that is the silence of poetry and the worlds that emanate from there. So one can say that the Bienal is an effort to imagine other ways, paths, entry points, portals other than the ones we have inherited that do not seem to be taking us anywhere but to a programmed doomsday. So it is a humble effort to deprogram us from the violent programming that have been forced upon the world and humanity over the past 500 years of coloniality or 2,000 years of monotheism.

Keyna Eleison: I see the presence of Conceição Evaristo, by herself, as a powerful argument of how art has poetic paths and these paths can be, and are, structurally philosophical. Having Conceição Evaristo’s poem and a phrase from it in the title, in this sense, as a call to action. It’s a great invitation.

Why did you decide to split the exhibition into three fragments/axes? How does this approach allow you to go deeper with your curatorial research?

Ndikung: The fragments could be understood as different entry points or portals into these submerged worlds that only the silence of poetry penetrates. But it also helps guide us with regards to curatorial methodology and research.

Anna Roberta Goetz: I think that each fragment opens a portal to one way of understanding the core idea of the exhibition—each taking the writing of different thinkers as an entry point. But the three fragments do not each stand alone, they are all interwoven and relate to each other. This methodology reflects on how we think that we have to perceive the world we live in—a world in which everything is interconnected.

Eleison: Having three starting points can also put us in a rhythmic dynamic, it’s not necessary to choose one point in negation of the other but to follow and experiment with possibilities of conjugation and contouring.

Ndikung: With the first fragment, Evaristo’s poem somehow takes us to estuaries as metaphor for spaces of encounter, spaces of survival, spaces wherein humanity could learn a lot.

Goetz: It also suggests that conjugating humanity as a verb might mean that we have to relearn to listen; listen to one another, but also to the world and its rhythm, to listen to the land, to listen to plants and animals, to imagine the possibility of alternative roads—so it’s about taking a step back and listen before walking.

Ndikung: The second fragment had René Depestre’s poem “Une conscience en fleur pour autrui” as a guiding light into those submerged worlds. The poem begins with a very strong claim: “My joy is to know that you are me and that I am strongly you.” In my humble opinion, this is the key to humanity and the code to regaining the humanity we have lost. The children I see dying of bombs or hunger are essentially me and I am them. They are my children and my children are them. There are no other ways. We must get off that road that tells us they are not human or sub-human.

The third fragment is an invitation by Patrick Chamoiseau and Édouard Glissant to ruminate on “the intractable beauty of the world”… Yes, there is beauty in the world and in humanity, and we must reclaim that in the face of all the ugliness that humanity seems to have been reduced to!

You also ask about curatorial research. For this Bienal, each of us adopted a bird and tried to fly their migration routes. Not only to get acquainted with other geographies but also to try to see, hear, feel, think otherwise… It was also a learning process to understand bird agency, migration, consistency, subsistence, and much more and how these could be implemented within curatorial practice.

Bonaventure, the exhibitions you have curated around the world have included much more than just the art in the galleries. Will this be the same with this Bienal? And can you explain why you think that’s important?

Ndikung: Firstly, while I love art affine people who have no qualms walking into a gallery or museum, I am very much interested in those who see a massive threshold to cross when they stand in front such cultural institutions. So, my practice as a curator has also always been about presenting art within such spaces but also taking much out of the galleries or, better put, imagining the world out there as THE gallery par excellence. Secondly, with my interest in performativity and efforts to transform exhibition making into a performative practice, I feel it is crucial to connect the inside to the outside and create smoother transitions between these spaces. Thirdly, as someone interested in and teaching Spatial Strategies, I am interested in the politics of spaces. The architecture, politics, socialist of gallery spaces have a very limited vocabulary. In an effort to expand that vocabulary, we find ourselves engaging with other spaces beyond those gallery spaces.

How did you choose the locations for the different Invocations? Why are those cities and their art scenes important to understanding this edition of the Bienal?

Ndikung: We chose them collectively. From my vantage point, we cannot talk about conjugating humanity by only coming to São Paulo. We wanted to situate ourselves in different geographies to engage with people already reflecting on what it means to be human and finding ways of making us more human. Then we were interested in the Sonic like Gnawa, Gwoka, Taraab, Kankyō ongaku as Carriers of a deeper sense of humanity and relationality with the world. We were also interested in connecting different waters, the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Pacific, Mediterranean, etc.

Goetz: We are convinced that in order to move forward we always have to consider many interconnected paths simultaneously—so the journey is not linear, but it takes curves and detours. In that spirit, we are interested in listening to voices in different parts of the world, to learn about different strategies to walk alternative roads. So the Invocations are the first chapters of the public program of the Biennial. They mirror the exhibition’s concept of Humanity as Practice in specific local contexts, their specific history and thinking. They are also a way of our curatorial process of conjugating humanity in different ways—so a learning process toward the exhibition that will be presented next year.

Alya Sebti: The first Invocation will be in Marrakech. It is inspired by the practices of deep listening and experiences of togetherness that have been taking place for centuries in this place, from the spiritual traditions of Gnawa music and Sufi invocation to the agora of storytelling that is the square Jemaa el-Fna. There is a crucial moment in each of these practices, thanks to the polyphony and repetition of the rhythm, where we stop listening with our ears only and create a space to receive the sound with the whole body. This is when the body remembers conjugating humanity as an immemorial practice.

As the legendary Moroccan poet Laabi wrote in “L’arbre à poèmes, fragments d’une genèse oubliée”: “Je ne me reconnais d’autres peuples que ce peuple impossible / Nous nous rejoignons dans la transe / La danse nous rajeunit / Nous fait traverser l’absence / Une autre veille commence / Aux confins de la mémoire”. (“I do not recognize any other people than this impossible people / We come together in a trance / The dance rejuvenates us / Makes us cross the absence / Another vigil begins / At the edge of memory.”)

Eleison: The Invocations are part of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo’s curatorial party, as a concept and as a practice. If our thinking travels, so does our practice. We chose locations collectively and found partners who walk with us in each location. Getting out of your place in order to be more yourself; finding differences that unite us, having certainties that disagree and unite us.

There has been an uptick in interest in Brazilian art over the past few years, especially with Adriano Pedrosa organizing the 2024 Venice Biennale. How does the curatorial team expect to navigate this context, and perhaps subvert people’s expectations of what they will see when they come to São Paulo next year?

Ndikung: There was already great art being made in Brazil like in other places before, it’s very important to pay attention to what is happening outside of certain trends and waves. After every uptick comes a downtick.

Thiago de Paula Souza: Our idea obviously involves a desire to contribute to making the work of artists from the region visible on an international platform like the biennial, but I believe that our main aim is to understand how international perspectives can be read from the Brazilian context.