Conjugations – To the Measure of Our Feet – SAVVY Contemporary
On September 6, as part of Conjugations, the public program of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, which aims to bring together institutions from around the world to collectively explore and celebrate humanity, SAVVY Contemporary will participate with the offering To the Measure of Our Feet.
As a part of this year’s edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, SAVVY Contemporary is honored to present an offering rooted in sonic agency, radical hospitality, corpoliteracy, and forms of collective listening. For the Sunday programme of Conjugations we invite you to a conversation, a reasoning with the photographer and curator, as well as long-term SAVVY friend and collaborator Akinbode Akinbiyi.
Displaying fragments from his lifelong photographic practice, we invite the audience to an act of storytelling, in which Akinbode Akinbiyi captures and visually narrates the quotidian of megacities such as Lagos, Johannesburg, Berlin and São Paulo, through the lens of his analogue camera. Rendered in black and white tones, these captured moments reflect the stillness, chaos and essence of the cities Akinbiyi encounters and continuously wanders.
Throughout the session, we put a particular accent on the city of São Paulo – one the artist affectionates – as we discuss the series of new images he produced earlier this year, while sojourning in the city for six weeks, mapping its arteries through the lens of his camera and to the measure of his feet.
Akinbode Akinbiyi (Oxford, 1946. Lives in Berlin) is a photographer and itinerant artist who roams urban spaces, attentive to everyday life and its subtle layers. Inspired by the inversion of the autobiography title I Wonder as I Wander, by Langston Hughes — a poet, novelist, playwright, and social activist — he adopts “wander to wonder” as a guiding principle of his practice. His walks become acts of listening and contemplation, seeking to understand the world through images. His photographs evoke visual laments and intuitive resonances from a time yet to come. He has participated in the FotoFest Biennial (Houston, 2020), documenta 14 (Kassel, 2017), and the exhibition Creative Africa (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016), among others.
SAVVY Contemporary — the laboratory of forms ideas is an artistic organisation, discursive platform, place for good talks, foods and drinks – a space for conviviality and cultural plurilog. As a public and independent organism in perpetual becoming, it is animated by around 25 members and a network of collaborators, co-creating community and communities it breathes with. SAVVY Contemporary situates itself at the threshold of the West and the non-West to understand their conceptualisations, ethical systems, achievements, and ruins. It develops tools, proposes perspectives and nourishes practices towards imagining a world inhabited together.
Service
Conjuations – To the Measure of Our Feet – SAVVY Contemporary
36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice
September 7, 2025
Sunday, 4 pm
Auditorium
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion
Ibirapuera Park, gate 3
Av. Pedro Alvares Cabral, s/n
São Paulo, SP
free admission