Performance – Olivier Marboeuf, Tiganá Santana, Victoria Santos, and James Desiris – Où sont nos monuments? / Where are our monuments?
On November 16, the performance Où sont nos monuments? / Where Are Our Monuments? by Olivier Marboeuf, with Tiganá Santana, Victoria Santos, and James Desiris, will take place from 2 pm to 4 pm in the Invocations space, on the second floor.
By asking “where are our monuments?”, the opening line of the famous poem The Sea Is History by Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, Olivier Marboeuf imagines a special way to keep Afro-confluent memories alive, through mobile and anti-heroic sites of transmission that circulate from mouth to mouth, from skin to skin.
Olivier Marboeuf (1971, Antony. Lives in Rennes and Paris) is an author, storyteller, artist, film producer, and independent curator from Guadeloupe. He co-founded Amok, a publishing house focused on comic book research, and was the artistic director of Espace Khiasma, an independent art center dedicated to minority representations in the suburbs of Paris. He is also a founding member of RITAA, an independent artistic network in Guadeloupe. His publications range from theoretical essays to poetry. As an artist, he places voice, writing, and drawing at the center of a research practice devoted to alternative methods of archiving. As a Banister Fletcher Global Fellow in Urban Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris, he explored the multiple contributions of the Caribbean to the urban life and infrastructures of London and Paris.
Tiganá Santana (1982, Salvador. Lives and works in São Paulo) is a professor at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo (IEB-USP), translator, and multidisciplinary artist. He was the first Brazilian composer to create an album entirely in African languages. His studies and publications focus mainly on language studies, African Bantu philosophies, translation, and the arts. His doctoral thesis received the Antônio Cândido Award for Best Dissertation from ANPOLL (National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Language and Linguistics), becoming a key reference for Bantu studies in Brazil, through his dialogue with Congolese thinker Bunseki Fu-Kiau. He was one of the participating artists of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, and among his recent works are the curatorship of the exhibition Línguas Africanas que Fazem o Brasil at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa (2024/2025) in São Paulo, Nossa Vida Bantu at the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR-RJ) in 2025, and the release of the album Caçada Noturna (2024).
Victoria dos Santos is a researcher of African diaspora cultural expressions in Latin America, percussionist, singer, and composer from São Paulo. Her work incorporates elements of electronic music and the Black Brazilian songbook, featuring collaborations across musical genres that highlight the fundamental transcultural nature of her artistic practice.
James Desiris is a Haitian multidisciplinary artist—poet, director, performer, photographer, and researcher—whose work blends ritual, memory, and contemporary creation. Born in Port-au-Prince, he draws on Vodou, poetry, and the memory of exile as the foundations of his artistic language. Through performance, photography, and film, he seeks to establish a dialogue between the body, the word, and the sacred, questioning the place of Haitian identity within contemporary spaces of migration and creation. His work unfolds between Haiti, Brazil, and Europe, in a continuous exchange between African spiritualities, colonial resistance, and diasporic voices.
Service
Performance – Olivier Marboeuf, Tiganá Santana, Victoria Santos, and James Desiris – Où sont nos monuments? / Where Are Our Monuments?
36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice
Nov 16, 2025
Sun, 2 pm
Invocations space, 2nd floor
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion
Ibirapuera Park, Gate 3
São Paulo, Brazil
free admission