On a late afternoon of Carnival Friday, Akinbode Akinbiyi was walking down Três Rios Street when he was intrigued by a tangle of cables on an electric pole. In addition to the weight of the wiring, the pole held a sign indicating the direction of two regions in São Paulo: Dom Pedro Park, in the historic center, and Canindé, a neighborhood once portrayed by Maria Carolina de Jesus in Child of the Dark and now a refuge for the Bolivian community. This small fragment of everyday life on that street caught his attention, prompting him to capture the moment with a Rolleiflex camera, later remarking: “Thank you for waiting, André.” This is one of the first images from Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic essay commissioned for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo.

A street named after the meeting of three rivers became the estuary that the wanderer Bode chose to circumnavigate for six weeks in the city. This convergence of streets, people, experiences, and expectations is the main connective thread in Akinbode’s relationship with the cities he inhabits, visits, and photographs. It is what essentially makes him a street photographer, committed to capturing on the sensitive film of analog photography the particularities of the tacit agreement made by millions of people to live together in a megacity. A photographic practice Akinbode has pursued since the 1970s – a slow and continuous process that has already passed through Lagos, Cairo, Berlin, Dakar, Johannesburg, Chicago, Bamako, and others – and now São Paulo.

At the meeting point of the rivers, Casa do Povo. The pace of a metropolis and the slow, reflective time of photographic thinking and making may seem opposed, but together they reveal the rhythms of the city and its people. As an experience aimed at expanding São Paulo’s social fabric, Akinbode Akinbiyi engaged with and followed the activities of the many groups, associations, and collectives that operate within the Casa do Povo cultural center in the Bom Retiro neighborhood: the chess club, Yiddish choir rehearsals, boxing training, the graphic workshop…

What can one expect from a photographic essay about the people of São Paulo? What did this insane, conservative, and diverse city offer the photographer? Or what did it refuse to show him, naively believing it could hide its unique urban dynamics from Akinbode’s generous gaze? These questions arose upon realizing that, while the photo of the pole on Três Rios Street was being taken, it remained virtual – potential – and would be made actual in the exhibition space of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, likely at the very moment you are reading this short text. Was the photograph of the meeting of the three rivers there?