Dorothee Richter: Explain your personal curatorial approach and background.

Alya Sebti: I was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and raised between cultures from the African continent and the Mediterranean. This constant movement across languages and geographies shaped a curatorial approach grounded in relationality and embodied knowledge. While my academic training in art history took place in Paris, it was through engaging with artists, writers, and curators outside traditional art circuits that I found my curatorial language—a practice of relation.

Since 2016, I have been directing ifa Gallery Berlin with a research and exhibition platform titled untie to tie, which interrogates colonial structures in contemporary societies. The biennale as a curatorial space has been a constant in my practice: as artistic director of the Marrakech Biennale (2014), guest curator of the Dakar Biennale with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (2018), co-curator of Manifesta 13 in Marseille (2020) and as a board member of the International Biennale Association (2012–2018).

My work is informed by how diasporic movement, colonial residue, and cultural memory surface in nonlinear and embodied ways. I view exhibitions as spaces of resonance where rhythm and poetry guide the ‘parcours’, the path through the exhibition like a story being told. The sonic and the practice of active listening are fundamental to me: spatial mode of being that opens pathways to forms of knowledge and presence that challenge dominant frameworks. Last but not least, I believe in the curatorial approach as an act of carving out space and fostering relationships.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: I wouldn’t call my curatorial approach personal. I think it has always been a quest for something one might call communitarian curatorship — to borrow the notion of
communitarianism from Kwame Nkrumah. An appropriate image to portray what I mean by communitarian curatorship would be the care given to the mosque of Djenné on a yearly basis. The adobe Sudano-Sahelian architectural styled mosque of Djenne was built in the 13th century and upgraded to its current form in 1907. On a yearly basis, Malians from around the would flock to Djenne to practice an exercise of care through plastering, mending, rehabilitating, repairing the mosque through community work. This is the kind of curatorial practice I strive towards. Anchored in responsibility towards history, epistemology, sociopolitical concerns and dignity. It is a curatorial practice that does not rest on the normative, capitalist and patriarchal idea of the singular genius curator but on a collegial, communitarian interplay of authorship and readership. 

A curatorial practice based on deep listening to each other and having one’s ears on the ground. That’s why I often use the image of the seismograph. A curatorial practice that acts with and responds to the seismograph. In the past I have described this curatorial practice as being similar to the practice of a DJ, because it is a practice that demands a proper reading of space, time and those who inhabit a particular space-time.

It demands a deep sensibility to understand what ‘music’ one needs to play to keep the ‘dancers’ on the dance floor, and to maintain a sensitive conversation between artists, artworks and audiences. So it is a curatorial practice that centers phenomenology—the experiential, the performative, the sensual beyond just sight and much more.

Thiago de Paula Souza: Despite being a deeply segregated city, São Paulo has always had many meeting points, or clusters where you can encounter contemporary artistic production in a broad and expanded notion.

I guess my formative years followed the public policies implemented by President Lula’s administration, and further developed during Dilma Rousseff’s time in office when there was an expansion in the access to universities, which enabled a certain reconfiguration of who could access, produce, and circulate knowledge. This shift was also reflected in the Brazilian art system. So, despite all the contradictions and the violence that underpin the state, it was a period marked by a sense of optimism and experimentation.

I didn’t study art or curatorial studies — I studied social sciences and had an interest in anthropology, education, music, pop culture, and language, and together with a group of artists, researchers, educators, and psychologists, I was part of the education team at the Museu Afro Brasil, an institution that contributed immensely to rethinking the history of Brazilian art. I see that space in that time as a kind of laboratory, a place that allowed me to begin thinking about what the curatorial could be.

Keyna Eleison: I’m a Black Brazilian woman from the lower classes. This already defines my trajectory in many ways — because even before I made choices, many of them had already been made for me. And it was from these marks, these structural limits, that I decided to invent paths. It wasn’t just up to me to occupy spaces: I had to imagine them. Because of this, I have always developed my work based on expanded possibilities— where territories cross, roles multiply and language is not limited to a single field.

I’m a curator, writer, researcher, storyteller, singer, ancestral chronicler, cultural manager — these titles don’t separate me, they feed each other. I highlight my Griot and shaman heritage, because I carry with me a temporality that is not organized in straight lines, but in spirals of memory, intuition and word. I recognize myself in listening, in the rite, in the oral practice of sharing. My body is a living archive. I have a master’s degree in art history, a specialist degree in history and architecture, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy — a background that offers me conceptual breadth, theoretical rigor and the sensitivity to think about images, gestures and spaces. 

I was a member of the African Heritage Commission for the award of the Cais do Valongo region as a World Heritage Site (UNESCO), an experience that further consolidated my commitment to memory and the fight for visibility of African legacies in the Americas. I work on the development of exhibitions and on the meanings of works of art and artists — not just to show, but to make people see. To provoke listening. To give context and body to what is so often torn from its place of origin. I guide artistic processes, design curatorships, and think about art teaching based on art education and storytelling, because I believe that knowledge is born not just from text, but from gesture, speech and encounter. For me, orality is a form of ancestral technology — a form of resistance and living transmission.

I understand presence as an institutional act — being there is a political gesture, a displacement of structures. And I strongly advocate that quantity is a form of quality: MORE is MORE! The abundance, the overlap, the excess of life and voices — all of this interests me as language and as power.

I move between institutions and projects because I believe in the friction between worlds. And, as an independent curator, I understand that alliances, links and also dislinks are essential. They make up the ethics of my work. I’m not interested in permanence through status, but in the real encounter. The power of now. The creation of networks that are not sustained by convenience, but by trust and a mutual desire for transformation

 

Conceptual team for the 36th São Paulo Biennial, from left to right: Keyna Eleison, Alya Sebti, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Henriette Gallus, Anna Roberta Goetz and Thiago de Paula Souza © João Medeiros / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

 

Dorothee: Reflect on the realization of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo ambitious project to rethink humanity as a verb and a life practice, and to reconceptualize relationships, asymmetries and listening as the basis of living together.

Bonaventure: As the subtitle of the Bienal de São Paulo states “Of humanity as a practice”. So for this biennale we are inviting pluridisciplinary artists, scholars of varying disciplines and people from all walks of life to think together with us what it means to be human and how we could practice humanity for the betterment of our world.

It’s not an invitation to define humanity, but rather an invitation to think together about the multiple ways in which we could conjugate humanity. I can’t think of anything more important now than recentering the question of humanity— in a world where we see more and more humans being dehumanized by wars, global environmental crisis, capitalist economic manipulations, social and ethical erosions across the globe, etc. So the question of how to conjugate humanity seems more than urgent. What we have all taken for granted is that we think being human is an automatism like breathing air. But being human is not a passive process. It is an active one. So thinking of humanity as a verb means embracing that active form of humanity. It means waking up in the morning every day and being conscious of the fact that if I do not actively conjugate my humanity, I might end up dismantling my neighbors’ humanity. Many of us in the conceptual team, artists, audiences, just like most people in the world are descendants of historically disenfranchised people. People whose humanities were often violently stripped from them. And when we look left and right today we still see that happening.

As Aimé Cesaire points out in Discours sur le colonialisme, for one human to dehumanize another, he or she begins by dehumanizing themselves. And Paulo Freire points out early on in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that it’s the formerly dehumanized that will teach the world what it means to be human. I think this means that the act of self-dehumanization by dehumanizing others is a passive act, while someone whose humanity is being stripped away is very conscious of what is being taken away and what one needs to do to re-humanize. I guess that is what James in Percival Everett’s novel is working towards: reclaiming his humanity and showing how to conjugate humanity.

Conceição Evaristo poem Da calma e do silêncio serves as the entry point to this Bienal de São Paulo. Not only does it give us a title Not All Travellers Walk Roads, but the poem also evokes the importance of the sonic. Silence as we know is not the opposite of noise, but the possibility of filtering and listening to “other sounds”.

So, when Evaristo writes in the poem that there are submerged worlds that only the silence of poetry can penetrate, she is not talking about absence, but the sophisticated complex inhabited presence that’s almost spiritual. So she is inviting us to engage in the search for the silence of poetry, which is the key to those submerged worlds. In my reading of things, those submerged worlds are where we understand what it means to be human… so this exhibition is an invitation to the artists and audiences to collectively find that silence of poetry that helps us penetrate those submerged worlds.

 

Dorothee: What is your specific, situated contribution to this curatorial concept?

Alya: I consider an exhibition as a story being murmured as we walk a parcours. The sonic and the practice of active listening is a foundational element in my practice. Listening, for me, is an ethical, affective, and spatial mode of being. It opens pathways to presences that resist categorisation within dominant epistemic frameworks, to what has been historically silenced or rendered invisible.

My approach draws from African and Mediterranean diasporic genealogies, where knowledge is held in the body, in rhythms, in movement, voice and silences. This includes the healing ritual of the Lila in Gnawa culture or the collective chanting in Sufi ceremonies like the Haddra ritual. These practices offer ways of knowing that are rhythmic, embodied, and deeply relational. 

This perspective informed our first invocation for the Bienal de São Paulo, Souffles: On Deep Listening and Active Reception, held in Marrakech. We gathered around Gnawa trance and Sufi invocations, and listened to the voices of poets like Abdelatif Laâbi — whose revolutionary language in the 1970s remains urgently resonant today. That moment crystallized a central curatorial gesture: privileging poetics and presence. 

Like many people from the African continent, I grew up in a household where the invisible was part of the everyday. Each morning began with the question “what did you dream about?”, a practice of connecting the visible and the invisible that I only later recognized, through conversations with artists as a foundational epistemology. 

For me, curating is not about illustrating a concept, but about creating conditions of resonance, spaces where feeling precedes understanding. In her book of essays and poems Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde writes: The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.

I work to decenter the exhibition as a fixed format and dismantle colonial regimes of display. The poetics of listening guides this process: tuning into silence, into rhythm. Together with Bonaventure, Thiago, Keyna, Anna, and Henriette, we have worked to hold space for plural ontologies, allowing the exhibition to unfold as a field of resonance. My contribution probably lies in weaving a curatorial language of listening, relation, and embodied knowledge in an echo chamber to my colleagues’ practices.

 

Dorothee: How can the spirit of cooperation, which ruangrupa have employed as a post-autonomous practice, be preserved without producing problematic exclusions?

Alya: The spirit of cooperation, as practiced by ruangrupa, offers a necessary challenge to hierarchical curating. For cooperation to avoid reproducing exclusions, it must be locally rooted, historically aware, and grounded in deep, relational listening. For cooperation and collectivity to thrive, institutional frameworks must be reconfigured to support, not just display these ways of working. As curators, we hold a responsibility to mediate between artists, institutional teams, and audiences with sensitivity and attentiveness, constantly negotiating the conditions that make sustainable collaboration possible. Cooperation cannot just be an aesthetic or discursive frame, it must be supported structurally. Institutions must be willing to shift their own rhythms and hierarchies to sustain these practices meaningfully.

Bonaventure: There is nothing like an autonomous practice. We all exist within a context and our being as our creations are in relation to other beings and non beings. What are problematic conclusions? I do not think of exhibitions as places in which conclusions are made. But rather where questions are posed, doors to unknown universes are opened, uncertainties are negotiated. To me an exhibition is more like the tremblement that Édouard Glissant writes about:

La pensée du tremblement:

Elle ne répond ni à la peur, ni au doute, ni à l’incertitude.

Elle résiste aux raidissements des pensées de système et aux emportements des systèmes de pensée.

Elle maintient tout système dans ses formes méthodologiques et le garde de verser dans des absolus.

Elle ouvre l’identité sur le rapport à l’Autre et sur le change qui provient alors de l’échange, sans que cette identité en soit perturbée ni dénaturée.

Elle est la pensée sismique du monde qui tremble en nous et autour de nous.

Elle en revient à ce passage, à ce suspens du jugement, et peut-être de l’Etre, que Montaigne a si génialement prétendus, comme à la fréquentation, non à la possession, de la terre, proposée par les pensées amérindiennes, comme à la fonction tellurique de la lignée des ancêtres, jamais close ni excluante, chantée par les peuples de l’Afrique des Griots. Les catastrophes frappent le monde, l’espoir vient aussi de partout.

Thiago: I find this question a bit difficult to grasp, but we know that any project will resonate more or less with different people — it will touch on themes that make more or less sense to various groups for countless reasons, whether related to class, race, political or religious orientation. In short, due to an infinite number of differences that should be acknowledged and preserved.

I think it’s important to understand that not all projects need to be designed to be appreciated or understood by everyone. We’re living in a time where the fragmentation of interests has become evident, and the formation of niches or new collectives and collectivities has taken shape — something I find genuinely interesting and full of potential.

Curatorial practice can aspire to create temporary infrastructures for dialogue among these different groups, but without any ambition of being universal or one-size-fits-all. That said, I really don’t understand what kind of connection could be made between ruangrupa’s practice and any process of segregation, as the question seems to suggest. To me, what was proposed there was a major learning process. That edition of Documenta seemed to ask: is it possible to transport and exhibit practices from context X — practices rooted in a certain kind of sociability — into Kassel?

Keyna: The spirit of cooperation is not just an example, it is an ethic. An ethic that is built on the continuous gesture of being with — not just alongside, but truly together. This is not a circumstantial moral choice, but a daily practice, a way of placing oneself in the world with attention and responsibility.

It is also a practice. A practice of observing and listening in a radical way, listening that doesn’t wait for its turn to speak, but that opens up, that disarms, that recognizes in the other a possible mirror of itself. To listen radically is to accept that you are not at the center, to accept discomfort, to allow the other to be fully present. And observing here isn’t watching — it’s noticing. It means noticing the smallest gestures, the silences, the rhythms that make up the collective in its plurality.

This ethics-practice is not neutral. It takes place in a daily life that is constantly crossed by the possibility of exclusion. We live in a world that insists on marginalizing, segregating and hierarchizing bodies, voices and knowledge. That’s why the spirit of cooperation needs to be even more radical: it needs to position itself as an active form of resistance. It needs to be a body in presence. A collective body. 

Cooperating, then, is more than helping. It means building together, with all the implications that this brings. It means sustaining coexistence on good days and, above all, on difficult days. It means defending the multiplicity of perspectives without trying to homogenize them. Strengthening listening without eliminating individualities - because it is precisely these individualities that make the collective alive, vibrant and in constant movement. 

Cooperation does not erase differences. On the contrary, it recognizes them as essential for its maintenance and constant change. Without singularities, the collective becomes a mass, not a group. Without tensions, there is no transformation. The spirit of cooperation, when ethical, is one that celebrates dissent as power, that understands conflict as opportunity, that knows that listening is often the most radical act of care.

 

Ramp of the Biennial Pavilion. São Paulo, 05/03/2011.
© Andres Otero / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

 

Ramp of the Biennial Pavilion. São Paulo, 05/03/2011.
© Andres Otero / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

 

View of the first floor of the Bienal Pavilion. São Paulo, 05/03/2011.
© Andres Otero / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

 

View of the Bienal Pavilion facade. São Paulo, 05/03/2011.
© Andres Otero / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

 

 

Dorothee: To what extent is it possible to leave conventional curatorial paradigms behind and what alternative forms will you integrate into your curatorial approach?

Alya: To me, to leave conventional curatorial paradigms behind is not about rejecting them entirely, but to create a shift from within. What the artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah referred to as a practice of “soft transgression.” I attune to what is whispered, unsaid or silenced by dominant institutional languages and bring it back to the core of every word in the story being written in that exhibition. It creates a space for friction, difference, and untranslatability to surface and take root. As I’ve said before, active listening is fundamental to me. It shapes how I imagine the exhibition as a relational space rather than a static format. The concept of this edition of the Bienal de São Paulo is Humanity as a practice; if we were to conjugate Humanity, my verb would definitely be: to listen. To listen as a foundational and transformative practice. 

Listening, for me, is not simply an aural act — it is an ethical, affective, and spatial mode of being. It opens pathways to ancestral knowledge, oral transmission, and presences that resist articulation within dominant conventional curatorial paradigms. The curator has a chance to prepare space, mediate but also understand when to step back. It requires being in relation with difference, moving at the speed of trust, and allowing for opacity. This is where curating becomes transformative for me: not in pretending to offer answers or illustrating concepts, but in collectively holding space for what is still becoming and consciously sharing it, making it accessible without forcing its translation.

 

Dorothee: How do you envision the connection to the immediate context of São Paulo (historical/socio-political)?

Thiago: Historically, the Bienal de São Paulo has served as a platform for connecting international practices with the local context, and our goal is to continue that tradition. While it’s true that in 2025 access, particularly online access, is broader than ever, we still can’t take for granted the power of art as a tool for cultural diplomacy and exchange. In addition, we are developing a program to run throughout the exhibition period, planned to keep the spirit of the project alive and engaging for the local crowd, with support from the education department and various partner institutions.

Keyna: The 36th Bienal de São Paulo is based on a poet who is a woman, Black, Brazilian and alive. And that in itself is a revolution and a total connection. Because it’s not just about a place — it’s about creation, conduction, practical and sensitive presence. It is from this body, this trajectory, this voice that the Bienal is structured, questions itself, expands.

And in view of this, I don’t know what would be a more profound, more radical, more beautiful way of looking at success. What other possible measure could there be than this: to see a Black, Brazilian, living woman, in full exercise of her imagination and poetic authority, opening up the paths of one of the biggest art events in the world?

The power is there — in the number, in the prestige, in the reach, in the gesture of making a crossroads of worlds with her own body. Success here is not an individual celebration: it is an affirmation of continuity. It’s knowing that this presence finds others. And that what begins with poetry has the strength to move structures.

Based on this presence, the curatorial process was carried out in constant dialog with artists who cross worlds, temporalities and ways of existing. Each choice was also a gesture of listening and summoning. In definitive partnership with the educational program, the construction of the exhibition unfolds as a space for mutual learning, where relationships, contexts and affections become part of the exhibition gesture itself.

 

Dorothee: Is there a specific work/artist shown in the upcoming Bienal that you would like to mention?

Bonaventure: Not one but all.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, 36th Bienal de São Paulo chief curator (2025), born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Ndikung is a prominent figure within the global contemporary art scene. His unique, interdisciplinary trajectory combines institution building as a practice, curatorial praxis with emphases on performativity, sonic, installative and visual arts, critical theory and discourse with an academic background in medical biotechnology and biophysics. Ndikung’s commitment to the intersection of art and science, together with his innovative vision, culminated in his appointment as director and chief curator of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) as of January 2023, after his tenure as founding director of SAVVY Contemporary. Ndikung is also a professor at the Weißensee Academy of art Berlin.

Keyna Eleison (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1979) is a curator, researcher, and educator in art and culture. With a degree in philosophy from UFRJ, a specialist degree in history of art and architecture and a master’s degree in art history from PUC-Rio, she took part in the legitimation of Cais do Valongo as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Eleison coordinated all public institutions from the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Department of Culture and taught at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, where she was also teaching coordinator. She writes for Contemporary & magazine and, since 2019, is the founder of the collective Nacional Trovoa, showcasing the artistic production of black and non-white women. She was the curator of the 10th Bienal Internacional de SIART in Bolivia (2018), the curator of the 1st Bienal das Amazônias (2023), the artistic director of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2020-2023) and director of research and content at the Bienal das Amazônias.

Henriette Gallus (Grevesmühlen, German Democratic Republic, 1983) is a communication and cultural strategist as well as an editor. After working as an editor and literary agent from 2005 onwards, in 2011 she became the press officer of dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), and from 2014 head of communications of the 14th edition of documenta in both Kassel and Athens (2017). From 2018-2022 she was deputy director of steirischer herbst festival for contemporary art in Graz, until she became deputy director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, in 2022. She has advised numerous cultural institutions worldwide, among them: sonsbeek 20–>24, Arnhem; Rencontres de Bamako, Mali, 2018 and 2022; the German Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2021, and Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporeana, Turin from 2017 to 2023.

Anna Roberta Goetz (Basel, Switzerland, 1984) is a curator and writer living between Switzerland and Mexico. Her research interests include artistic strategies that challenge hierarchies and narratives prevalent in society. She has worked at the Marta Herford Museum and the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, both in Germany, and was assistant curator and project manager of the German Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. She has staged outstanding solo and group exhibitions in several countries and has taught at various international art schools, such as the Zurich University of the Arts (Switzerland) and the Städelschule in Frankfurt (Germany). She is widely published in art magazines and has a number of recent and forthcoming publications, including Rodney McMillian: The Land: Not Without a Politic, organized with Kathleen Rahn (2024) and Cinthia Marcelle – By Means of Doubt, organized with Isabella Rjeille (2023).

Alya Sebti (Casablanca, Morocco, 1983) is a contemporary art curator and director of ifa-Galerie (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) in Berlin (Germany), where she created the research and exhibition platform Untie to Tie – on colonial legacies in contemporary societies. Her independent curatorial practice focuses on  the Biennale format as a space of encounter. She was co-curator of the European Manifesta biennial in Marseille in 2020, guest curator of the 2018 Biennale de Dakar in Senegal, and artistic director of the 2014 Marrakech Biennale in Morocco. She has also staged exhibitions in several countries and has written extensively on art and the public sphere. Her most recent publications include Untie to Tie (2021), about colonial structures in schools. She has supervised curatorial research with mentoring programs at the ZK/U artist residency in Berlin and at MACAAL in Marrakech with a focus on contemporary practices in relation to post-independence artistic languages in North and West Africa.

Thiago de Paula Souza (São Paulo, Brazil, 1985) is curator and educator. He is interested in stretching and re-elaborating the exhibition format as well as in the intersection of contemporary art and education in the creation of new ethical codes. He is co-curating the 38th Panorama of Brazilian Art at the MAM São Paulo (2024). Recently, he co-curated Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s, at Raven Row in London. Between 2022 and 2023, he was co-curator of the Nomadic Program at the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art (The Netherlands). In 2022, he co-curated While we are embattled (Para Site, Hong Kong) and Acts of revolt (MAM Rio, Brazil). Between 2020 and 2021, he was part of the curatorial team of the 3rd edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts, São Paulo. He also was a curatorial advisor for the 58th Carnegie International (2021/2022, United States). In 2018/2019, he curated Tony Cokes’ first solo exhibition in The Netherlands, at BAK (Utrecht). He was a member of the curatorial team of the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018). He’s currently a member of the Artistic Committee of NESR Art Foundation, in Angola, and a PhD candidate at HDK Valand – University of Gothenburg (Sweden).