What can one expect from a photographic essay about the people of São Paulo? On a late afternoon during Carnival, Akinbode Akinbiyi was walking down Três Rios Street when he became intrigued by a tangle of cables on a utility pole. The pole held a sign indicatingthe direction of two regions in São Paulo: Dom Pedro Park, in the city’s historic centre, and Canindé, a neighbourhood once portrayed in Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diary, Child of the Dark, and now a refuge for Bolivian communities. A street named after the meeting of three rivers later became the estuary Akinbiyi chose to circumnavigate for six weeks. This convergence of streets, people, experiences, and expectations is the main connective thread in Akinbiyi’s relationship with the cities he inhabits, visits, and photographs. It is also the basis for a photographic practice he has sustained since the 1970s—a slow and continuous process that has passed through the cities of Lagos, Cairo, Berlin, Dakar, Johannesburg, Chicago, Bamako, and others—one that now takes place in São Paulo. The pace of a metropolis and the reflective time of photographic thinking and making may seem opposed, but together they reveal the rhythms of the city and its people. Through an extended engagement with São Paulo’s social fabric, Akinbiyi, capturing these moments with his Rolleiflex camera, followed the activities of the many groups, associations, and collectives that operate within the Casa do Povo cultural centre in the Bom Retiro neighbourhood: a chess club, Yiddish choir rehearsals, boxing training, and a graphics workshop.

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:

Reproductions of photographs on fabric, medium format analogue film, b&w, each 200 × 200 cm: 13 photographs from the series Casa do Povo, Bom Retiro, São Paulo (2025); 7 photographs from the series Bom Retiro, São Paulo (2025), Hugueta Sendacz, Casa do Povo, Bom Retiro, São Paulo (2025); República, São Paulo (2025); Sé, São Paulo (2025); Vila Madalena, São Paulo (2025). All courtesy of the artist