Emerging from Brazil’s histories, landscapes, and plural cosmologies, Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice proposes humanity as an ongoing action, to be practised, rehearsed, renewed every day. Listening stands at the centre of this proposition: listening to people, to lands and waters, to more-than-human worlds; listening as a way of entering relation, unsettling hierarchies, opening space for one another.

There are many resonances between the location of the Berlin edition of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, held at HKW, its topography, architecture, and projected functions and the site of the São Paulo exhibition: both are located in parks created as the lungs of their cities, Tiergarten and Ibirapuera; both are shaped by modernist architecture, HKW and the Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo; and both are located close to rivers, visible or hidden, the Spree and the Córrego do Sapateiro. Both locations act as porous thresholds between architecture and landscape, interior and exterior, culture and nature. At and around HKW, foxes, rabbits, and ducks live close to passersby, visitors, diplomats; around Ibirapuera park, parrots, toucans, marmosets live close to picnic-goers, joggers, and children. The exhibition’s central metaphor, the estuary, gains particular resonance here: a site where different waters meet, sustaining life through interdependence and reciprocity. In both São Paulo and Berlin, modernist architecture holds its ambivalences close, intertwined with the promise of a better future, of improving people’s lives, and at the same time, entangled with the coloniality of power. Modernism developed alongside systems of extraction, territorial control, the governance of bodies and resources—its geometries carry sediments, histories still being negotiated, still pressing against the present.

I find a report the same week I am writing this text: Thomas Piketty, Lucas Chancel, and their colleagues at the World Inequality Lab, gathered in Paris to launch what they call the ‘Global Justice Report’.[1] It sets out a plan in which incomes for the majority of the world’s population could double by 2100, wealth could finally be taxed where it has piled up, untouched, working hours could shrink, diets could shift, and warming could still be held below two degrees. The economist Jason Hickel calls it ‘technically feasible’, and names the real obstacle as something else entirely: the absence of a shared, concrete vision of what we are working toward. The report’s deepest claim is that humanity is something we still have to build, on purpose, together, starting now.

There is hope in this claim, and there is also an urgency that asks for drastic, radical change. In a moment when the loud and the aggressive keep gaining ground, we refuse that path. We commit, instead, to humanity as a practice—something constantly in movement, something that learns to live inside chaos and still finds new ways to rebondir, to listen, to dance a bigidi, to remember, to recognize.

Standing inside HKW, it is worth remembering that the building itself carries these ambivalences. Built in 1957 as the Kongresshalle, it bears the hopes that modernism projected into the future, its aspirations toward openness, democracy, and collective life, yet remaining inseparable from the systems of power, extraction, and geopolitical imaginaries through which many of those futures were conceived. Like the Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo in São Paulo, its architecture holds these promises and contradictions together, reminding us that the histories we inherit are never singular.

Throughout the exhibition, artists inhabit this space critically and imaginatively. They reveal the enduring legacies of dehumanization, dispossession, and extractivism, while cultivating gestures of care, reciprocity, and repair that extend beyond the human, reaching toward land, water, memory, and spirit. In doing so, they invite us to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world—ones grounded not in domination, but in inter- dependence and shared responsibility.

A seventy-five-metre-long banner welcomes visitors to HKW. This work by Tanka Fonta is best understood as part of a much larger project: a mural, inspired by poetic recitations staging a dialogue between human and plant intelligence, this mural echoes the permanent site-specific mural Fonta created for HKW’s main foyer. Underneath the mural, Cevdet Erek greets us with Rampa rítmica—HKW [Rhythmic ramp—HKW], an audio intervention, drawing on percussive patterns distilled from Istanbul’s musical underground and from São Paulo’s vernacular rhythms.

Entering the Sylvia Wynter Foyer, photographs by Akinbode Akinbiyi foreground his six weeks spent wandering São Paulo with a Rolleiflex camera. His large black-and-white prints hang suspended from the ceiling, throwing shadows across the floor. Beside them, Ming Smith’s photographs carry their own soundtrack. She has spent decades photographing jazz and blues musicians, among them Grace Jones, David Murray, and James Brown. Laila Hida’s installation Sange khara [Hard Stone] offers something closer to a pause. A 16mm film loops in a space inspired by the architecture in the Sahara Desert with its traditional textile melhfa. Above the room, Alberto Pitta’s printed fabrics from the archives of his studio in Salvador de Bahia hang from the ceiling and walls, prints he spent more than four decades designing for the city’s Black Carnival groups.

At the entrance of the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall, Leo Asemota’s piece is derived from the Kissi penny, a twisted iron currency once believed to hold souls. Asemota’s pieces are offered as a libation to every living artist in the exhibition, continuing a practice of acknowledging ancestors through gesture. Nearby, Amina Agueznay’s three monotypes emerge from her long-standing collaborations with artisans across Morocco. Rooted in vernacular knowledge and gestures of making, they evoke transmission as a living process, where memory is carried through materials, hands, and the continuous transformation of inherited practices. In his video work what colours can we dream in this night filled with salt?, Julianknxx features a song that runs through the space like a current beneath the floor—built from choir, spoken word, and fragmented testimony, proposing a radical form of listening.

Rebeca Carapiá’s sculptures grow from her study of the walking palm, a tree found across the Amazon basin whose tangled aerial roots migrate slowly toward the sun. Her installation translates this botanical movement into twisted, soldered lines of copper and iron, treating walking itself as a method of thought. Beside her, the painter Théodore Diouf draws on Sereer cosmogony, in which trees are considered living beings equal to humans, and recurring snake motifs nod to the pangool (ancestral spirits). Theo Eshetu’s installation The Garden—Ode to Courage pulses with kaleido- scopic footage of plants and ecosystems, layered with a soundtrack that weaves together voices, including Maya Angelou’s reflections on resilience.

Aline Baiana’s film Ouro negro é a gente [Black gold is the people] follows the testimonies of fishermen, shellfish gatherers, and quilombola communities on Ilha de Maré whose land and water have been degraded by the Mataripe refinery and the Aratu harbour—projects often celebrated as symbols of national progress. Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos builds her installation A casa de Bené [Bené’s house] from objects salvaged from her great-grandfather’s demolished home. Woven through with textile sculptures, the columns of the work stand for his nine children, while bronze baskets refer- ence the mining town of Bela Vista de Minas, holding charcoal, stone, earth, ore, and tobacco. Lidia Lisbôa’s crochet series Tetas que deram de mamar ao mundo [Breasts that nursed the world] hangs from the ceiling in triangular forms, acting as voluminous monuments to breastfeeding women and the act of mending oneself as a survival strategy.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s sculptural installation Macuto, built around heliconia forms and translucent fabric walls, draws on her own Cuban heritage of Hispanic, Chinese, and enslaved Nigerian ancestry and on the Santería belief that existence spans both the physical and the spiritual. Leiko Ikemura addresses the ambivalence in times of war and fragmentation, and the desire for elevation, a recurrent theme of totemic shapes that remind us that the very first human sculptures, the menhirs, were conceived as an attempt to connect the earth with the sky. Juliana dos Santos’s installation comes from a vision of blue she experienced during a meditation. Thinking through the sensoric experience of this colour, she blows roasted Clitoria ternatea, a flower with healing properties, onto wet canvas.

Gervane de Paula builds pseudo-fictional scenes from wood, paint, and found objects that confront the violence of agribusiness, unregulated mining, and the political corruption that follows them. Sérgio Soarez’s assemblages of rusted tools, keys, and weathered wood evoke Yoruba sacred geometry and the orishas. They suggest that healing arrives through ordinary, repurposed materials and daily practices of belief.

In the Forough Farrokhzad Garden, Emeka Ogboh’s installation The Way Earthly Things Are Going II (Mother Earth’s Lament), a choral lament composed from folk songs, oral testimony, and environmental data sings of collective grief in its meditation on deforestation.

At the entrance to the Beatriz Nascimento Hall, Forensic Architecture and its Berlin-based sister agency Forensis present Delta-Delta: The People’s Court I, the first phase of an investigation into the ‘transatlantic petro-extractivist complex’—from the 1897 British sacking of the Benin Kingdom through to the Niger Delta and the Mississippi Delta.

Inside the Hall, we imagine conversations and encounters between artists who have passed across individual trajectories. Mohamed Melehi was among the founders of the Casablanca Art School and a prominent figure of post-colonial Moroccan modernism. His signature wave motif suggests movement, fluidity, and cosmic relations playing out between sun, sea, and horizon.

Chaïbia Talal, a self-taught artist and illiterate her whole life, found her way into the international art world in 1965. Her work was initially dismissed as ‘naïve’, a label often applied to self-taught women artists who lacked the same opportunities as their European counterparts. Nearby, Maria Auxiliadora was raised in a family of modest means but abundant artistic pursuits. Without any formal training, she developed her own gesso preparation, applied to her paintings to give them a three-dimensional quality, with meticulous attention given to the faces, hands, and clothing of her subjects. Both Talal and Auxiliadora painted from memory and intimacy rather than formal training, and both met resistance in their lifetimes before a much-overdue recognition caught up with their work. Alongside these seminal figures and in line with the intimacy of the former works, Wolfgang Tillmans photographs, working somewhere between document and visual poem, return the river motif to the room. Manauara Clandestina’s multidisciplinary installation TRANSCLANDESTINA 3020 puts forth a prophetic of a travesti vision. Working with collaborators from fashion, music, and film, she transforms repurposed workers’ uniforms into a new clothing line, staged as a runway show in São Paulo.

Leaving Nascimento Hall, Christopher Cozier’s Sound System, Berlin Version 26, The Appeal project is a selection of posters based on his drawings. A composition by his son, the musician Isaac Cozier, weaves the original sound source from 2001 together with his own beats, layering two generations’ rhythms. Listening here means hearing Port of Spain itself, its basslines, its gatherings, its way of turning a street corner into a dancefloor. Lynn Hershman Leeson presents The Electronic Diaries, her four decades-long project of video confession, extended here for the first time with a new chapter, About Time. Leeson treats the camera as a confiding mirror, her continuous self-recording anticipating, long before social media, today’s debates about identity, surveillance, and the self as something endlessly rewritten on screen. Mao Ishikawa’s photographs, taken in the years after Okinawa’s administration returned to Japan while US military bases remained, document the women of the town of Kin who worked in bars around Camp Hansen and the American soldiers, with whom they built relationships of affection and economic necessity. Later, Ishikawa photographed one soldier’s family and friends in Philadelphia, away from the military context, extending the same intimate, unguarded gaze to both sides of a complex history. Olu Oguibe’s monumental banner carries a question into the public space: Must You Take Everything That Belongs to Indigenous People? Without prescribing an answer, it asks us to pause before the histories of dispossession that continue to shape our present. Looking outward across the river and toward the city, the work trans- forms the façade into a public address, where a single sentence invites visitors to reconsider what it means to inhabit a world built upon shared lands, memories, and responsibilities.

On the Paulette Nardal Terrace, three flags feature works by Malika Agueznay: a reproduction of the painting Le Paradis sous les pas des mères [Paradise is under the feet of mothers] features her landmark seaweed motif, her own way of evoking femininity. For the Berlin edition, two additional flags flutter alongside Le Paradis: Tiqlit, which means ‘bread’ in Amazigh, and Paix, Assalam [May peace be with you]. As hospitality is a political gesture, peace is held not as a wish but as daily, exercised faith, and a reminder of the traditional Arabic saying that paradise is placed under the feet of mothers, owed to the women who came before us and carried us here.

The garden, the river, the park, and the poems return together at the Anna Seghers Garden. On the flags here, poet Conceição Evaristo’s words appear in English, Portuguese, and German, alongside fragments of poems that are published in the related publication, the Reader. The exhibition returns to where it began: to poetry, to beauty held as conviction, to humanity practised as a daily commitment. There is a moment in which beauty stops us, then tips us off balance, until we stand with arms open, with no plan at all. Something vital gestates in that pause: a new rhythm, a will toward change. Beauty emerges here as a political force, rooted in the ordinary, the fractured, and the unfinished. The exhibition holds joy, imagination, and dreaming as vital practices of world-making.

[1] Lucas Chancel, Cornelia Mohren, Rowaida Moshrif, Moritz Odersky, Thom- as Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, ‘Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality and ProsperityWithin Planetary Boundaries’, Global Justice Project, 2026; reported by Jonathan Watts, ‘“An equal and habitable world is possible”: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival,’ The Guardian, 4 June 2026.