Bienal de São Paulo: Not All Travellers Walk Roads - Of Humanity as Practice

In the conclusion to one of his seminal essays titled People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg, the sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone discusses the intensifying immiseration of African urban populations, highlighting the economic and cultural collaborations among the residents seemingly marginalised by urban life.1 Using the city of Johannesburg as a case study to discuss the increasing precarity numerous people in the ever-growing urban cities face worldwide, AbdouMaliq describes the situation as one that is “real and alarming”, further adding that for “increasing numbers of urban Africans, their cities no longer offer them the prospect of improving their livelihoods or modern ways of life.”2

Being it in the cities of Dakar, Johannesburg, São Paulo - or in Europe -, we’re constantly confronted by the precarity and fragility of our bodies within public space. Through her newly commissioned piece Gardiens of Cosmos, the artist Pelagie Gbaguidi invites us to reflect on these urgent questions through architecture and urban planning prism. The installation consists of tent-like structures that remind us of the makeshift shelters sprouting in the rapidly growing cities worldwide, caused by a plethora of ills, among which the rampant housing crises. Often built from recycled and found materials, these shelters, initially intended to be temporary solutions, usually become permanent ones, pushing their inhabitants into some sort of ‘permanent temporariness’. Displayed all across the space, the tent-like structures are made of wooden frames carrying paintings on canvas. The canvases are double-sided: on their reverse, we find hand-drawn floor plans and maps of typical West African houses, as well as, on one of them, a transcription of the preamble to the Brazilian Constitution, which enshrines housing as a fundamental right. These back sides unfold as a composite cartography of collective habitat – simultaneously imagined and inherited – that echoes traditional architectures from West Africa, as explored in Habiter un monde by Jean-Paul Bourdier and Trinh T. Minh-ha. This gesture prompts us to reflect on the intersection of fundamental human rights and lived spatial realities, inscribed across various legal frameworks and everyday improvisations.

Numbered to five as a reference to the fingers of a hand, the installation metaphorically evokes the idea of giving someone in need a helping hand and thus confronts the audience with the insensitivity and lack of care given to a particular sphere of society in urban cityscapes, that is constantly relegated to the margins, and to a certain extent invisibilized due to the normalization of their precarious conditions.

1 Simone, Abdou Maliq, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture, 16(3), 2004, pp.407-429.
2 Ibid.