With the exhibition Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo comes to Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Taking place in Germany for the very first time, the Berlin edition of one of the oldest and most influential biennials unfolds as a distinct constellation of artistic positions, including newly conceived, readapted, and site-specific works.
Departing from Conceição Evaristo’s poem ‘Da calma e do silêncio’ [Of calm and silence], in which she writes: ‘Not all travellers/ walk roads/ there are submerged worlds/ that only the silence/ of poetry penetrates’, the exhibition understands listening as one of the core tenets of the practice of humanity. Through such close attunement, it becomes possible to enter into relation—with other beings, with lands and waters, with the multigenerational lineages we carry within us—and foster spaces of coexistence and care.
This notion of relation not only connects São Paulo and Berlin, but also the two respective exhibition sites. Designed as a modernist landmark, Oscar Niemeyer’s Bienal Pavilion is located in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, itself shaped by the waters of the Córrego do Sapateiro, while Hugh Stubbins’s HKW building of the same era is situated at the edge of the Tiergarten, close to the river Spree. Both sites form porous thresholds between architecture and landscape, interior and exterior, human and more-than-human worlds. Here, the exhibition’s guiding metaphor of the estuary as a site of encounter gains particular resonance: a place where different waters meet, sustaining life through cultivation, interdependence, reciprocity, and shared vulnerability.
The exhibition rethinks humanity as a verb—a living practice that can renegotiate and dismantle prevailing asymmetries. Across installations, performances, sound works, storytelling, and spatial interventions, the participating artists critically engage the political and colonial inheritances embedded within modernity. In doing so, they articulate forms of resistance to dehumanization, extractivism, and monocultural thinking from São Paulo to Berlin and elsewhere. At the same time, the works cultivate gestures of care, nurturing, and interdependence that extend beyond the human, engaging with animal and plant life, memory, and spirit. Beauty emerges here as a political force, rooted in the ordinary, the fractured, and the unfinished.
Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice is an invitation to trace those paths in pursuit of that practice. What routes do we take in that undertaking? How do we afford ourselves the privilege of going off track, off the road, embracing errancy, getting lost, finding other worlds? Bringing together more than thirty international artists across a wide range of practices, this abridged Berlin edition of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo calls for joy, imagination, and dreaming not as escape, but as vital ways of conjugating humanity.
