Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, the theme of the 36th São Paulo Art Biennial, resists the instinct to measure motion by speed, distance, or visibility. Instead, it offers a more generous calibration of what it means to move — through the world, through histories, through interior states that may appear still but are full of transformation. Borrowed from Conceição Evaristo’s poem Da calma e do silêncio, the title becomes both a provocation and an invitation: to reconsider what journeys look like, and more importantly, how we perceive them.
At its core, this Biennial is a critique of perception — not just what we see, but how we interpret and assign meaning to what we see. It challenges the impulse to read stillness as inertia, to assume that those who do not follow the roads we recognise are somehow unmoving. It is a reminder that movement is not always visible, and that many forms of travel unfold in silence, in memory, in resistance, in the daily acts of becoming and belonging.
In asking us to reframe our gaze, the Biennial proposes that perception is a practice — one that requires effort, attention, and care. Just as humanity is not a static condition but something we must continually choose and cultivate, perception too must be exercised. Art becomes the medium through which this exercise unfolds, inviting us to expand the capacity of our looking, our listening, our feeling. It is not enough to witness. We are asked to attune ourselves to nuance, to absences, to the subtle shifts that mark the passage of time or the weight of memory.
This Biennial imagines perception as an embodied ethic. To perceive widely is to relinquish the desire for fixed categories. To perceive empathetically is to honour what we do not yet understand. And to perceive lovingly is to approach difference not with suspicion but with reverence. These are not passive modes of engagement. They are acts of humility, of attention, and of deep respect. They are, in a sense, forms of travel in themselves.
Across its curatorial framing and conceptual threads, the Biennial makes space for forms of movement that are often overlooked: the migrations of thought, of inheritance, of spirituality, of desire. It recognises that not all paths can be mapped, and that many of the most profound journeys take place within. In doing so, it reminds us that our responsibility is not only to move through the world, but to remain perceptive to the movements of others — however quiet, however unfamiliar.
Not All Travellers Walk Roads does not offer spectacle. It offers a shift in orientation. It reminds us that perception, like humanity, is a practice that must be returned to, again and again. It calls for a slower kind of seeing, a deeper kind of listening, and a more tender mode of recognition. In doing so, it asks not only what we see, but how we choose to see — and who we are, in the act of seeing.