As part of the program for the 31^st Bienal, the Solano Trindade Popular Agency for Culture brought together a number of popular culture collectives from different neighborhoods throughout São Paulo to prepare some “saraus” (folk soirées) and performances for the event. Below is the group’s manifesto for its participation in the Bienal:  

Yes! We are the city!
The outskirts, which are everywhere, are the art of everywhere.    

Traditional and fringe cultures join in unison that legitimizes the ancestral and celebrates the contemporary, present in all who get that tingling down their spine when Marco Pezão hollers: “WE ARE A BRIDGE AND THERE’S NO RIVER WE CAN’T CROSS”—center is circumference, circumference is center!  

How do you speak about things that exist but which society pretends don’t? Yes, racism exists, social inequality is there for you to see, to feel; they shoot first, ask questions later, the ones in balaclavas who are turning my hood into a huge social prison. 

At #31Bienal, we’re going to start with Treme Terra (Earthshaking). A performance of sound sculptures working as an instrument for ancestral (re)connection. Music used as a tool to rearrange our ancestral atoms, creating an artistic bio-interaction in which the participants experiment with the sound sculptures that come from inside of each, as in a process of meditation between man and nature. Treme Terra—Esculturas Sonoras (Earthshaking—Sound Sculptures) at the opening of #31Bienal reconnects people cast from the African mold, from the fringe cultures and indigenous peoples in an intervention that pulses with the power of the Iorubá and Guarani.

We’re going to throw sauraus, deliver books, put on dance shows, distribute culture. At a time when power relations are being called into question and put in “check”, society will certainly be sent into “shock” when our most powerful weapon—the word—reverberates inside its each and every member. And those who give themselves the opportunity can engage with the driving force that keeps this cultural diversity circulating.   

#31Bienal can be a cry from the shantytowns! Look up and hear the poet Binho say that “a single swallow doesn’t make a summer, but it can sure wake up the whole flock”.  So rise the Southside flocks, the flocks of the North, the East and the West, from all over. From Jardim Ibirapuera to Ibirapuera Park, hollering that “POETRY SAVES LIVES” and that with us it’s “BLACK ON WHITE”.  

Last but not least, we end on a word of inspiration from the people’s poet, Solano Trindade, who said “DRINK FROM THE ORIGINAL SOURCE AND GIVE IT BACK TO THE PEOPLE IN THE FORM OF ART”.  

All in now!

Aline Maria - Leonardo Brito - Rafael Mesquita - Thiago Vinicius - Alex Barcellos - Aderbal Ashogun