The 36th Bienal de São Paulo opens to the public on September 6, 2025, at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, after a year and a half of curatorial engagements and encounters in different parts of the world.

The public program began in November 2024 with the Invocations convened in four locations: Marrakech, Guadeloupe, Zanzibar, and Tokyo. Each stop brought together artists, poets, musicians, and activists in performances, debates, rituals and presentations, discussing and enacting the spectrum of humanity through themes such as belonging, memory, togetherness, emancipation, interdependence, care, technology and transitions. These experiences served as an “initial ritual” that now flows into the exhibition in São Paulo, carrying stories and languages, tastes and sounds, aesthetics and rhythms that have crossed oceans and borders.

With a concept proposed by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, alongside co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, and Thiago de Paula Souza, co-curator at large Keyna Eleison, and strategy and communications advisor Henriette Gallus, this edition is inspired by the poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence] by poet Conceição Evaristo, and has active listening, encounter, negotiations, and respect as foundations of humanity as a practice. The metaphor of the estuary —a meeting place between different currents, site of manifestation and coexistence of different beings, space of exuberance— permeates an exhibition divided into six chapters, conceived as fractals and connected by constant flows and dialogues.

Text: Bienal de São Paulo