Sertão Negro at the 36th São Paulo Biennial

11 June 2025

Sertão Negro participates in the 36th São Paulo Biennial, titled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice. It was founded by Brazilian artist Dalton Paula and scholar Ceiça Ferreira as a centre for artistic practice, environmental care, and collective learning, located in the Cerrado biome in central Brazil.

Rooted in a dialogue with the quilombo traditions of the Território Kalunga, Sertão Negro honors ancestral ways of living and resisting, weaving these histories into its vision of cultural and ecological sovereignty.

Established in 2021 on the northern edge of Goiânia, Sertão Negro is a community-rooted project operating at the intersection of art, ecology, pedagogy, and emancipation. Taking its basis from the ongoing artistic practice of Dalton Paula – that varies in media from painting, to ceramics, film, collage and photography – the work of the entire organisation similarly looks to study and reinforce the continuing influence of historical figures and traditions of African descent on the surrounding landscape, which in turn can illicit a reflection on Brazil’s own wider colonial past.

Yet the scope of Sertão Negro extends beyond the arts, integrating not only a residency programme, an art school and accompanying studios, but also an agroecological garden, a fish farm and a public library. Its structures are built with rammed earth and other bioconstruction techniques, reaffirming a commitment to place and sustainability.

Through initiatives like Sertão Verde, the project annually produces over two tonnes of food from its gardens, grounded in Afro-Indigenous agricultural knowledge. Its Sertão Vermelho programme develops aquaculture for food security, producing hundreds of kilos of fish each year. These programmes anchor Sertão Negro’s vision of sovereignty: cultural, ecological, and social.

The project prioritises Black and LGBTQIA+ artists and actively supports creators from underrepresented territories, both in Brazil and abroad. Through this constellation of activities Sertão Negro makes space for presence – one where learning is inseparable from planting, preparing food, and imagining new forms of being together.

At the Biennial, Sertão Negro does not replicate itself. It instead poses questions: how do we carry not only the name, but the network of relations that make Sertão Negro possible? What does it mean to weave a territory inside a space like this?

Sertão Negro represents and sustains its activities through ongoing dialogues with its members. The soil that builds the walls, the seed banks that nurture the future and the fragments of collective life – each of these elements gesture toward this ongoing movement. Here, art is not isolated from life. It grows with it.

Image: Sertão Negro, Photo by Jhony Aguiar.

Sertão Negro at the 36th São Paulo Biennial