General curatorship Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, and Thiago de Paula Souza, co-curator at large Keyna Eleison.

"Casa de Bené" by Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos

Ana Raylander’s installation "Casa de Bené" exposes power structures through the materialization of gesture. Nine monumental sculptures traverse the three floors of the 36th São Paulo Biennial – under the title “Not Every Wanderer Walks Roads,” with general curatorship by Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and his curatorial team comprising Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, and Thiago de Paula Souza, alongside curator-at-large Keyna Eleison.

This body of work functions not merely as objects of contemplation, but reveals a system that has historically determined who may or may not inhabit certain spaces. The structures position themselves standing or placed on the ground, refusing traditional exhibition hierarchies and creating their own geography of affirmation. The magnitude of the pieces contrasts with the poetic urgency that originated them, suggesting the necessity of articulating memories that cannot wait.

Brown functions as a transformative agent of image and active operator of cultural formation. Raylander does not employ this color as decorative or symbolic element, but as matter that carries three centuries of complex narratives about identity. The clothes that compose the sculptures constituted the artist’s wardrobe for a decade, transforming the daily act of dressing into prolonged performance. This silent practice antagonizes the politics of erasure that have historically targeted racialized bodies, making brown color a visual event that persists through time.

The structures reveal how familial relations interweave with broader cultural, social, and political systems. The memory of the artist’s maternal great grandfather, whose house had been impregnated with the same brown coloration, connects domestic affection to questions of belonging. The family environment presents itself not as refuge from social tensions, but as space where identities are constituted through apparently neutral gestures. The choice to use personal clothing as raw material exposes how private and public spheres mutually constitute each other, making the wardrobe an archive of identity negotiations that exceed the individual. The house is also a field of dispute.

Raylander’s technique reveals tensions between hardness and softness that characterize experiences of subjects in processes of self-definition. The fabrics twisted over wooden beams and galvanized clamps create surfaces that simultaneously attract and resist touch.

The artist operates a radical inversion by conferring monumentality upon what has been historically diminished and marginalized. The substantial proportions of the pieces not only occupy physical space but claim symbolic presence, converting brown into monuments. This sculptural strategy confronts the tradition that reserved monumentality to celebrate hegemonic power, creating counter-monuments that affirm color as an expansive structure of humanity.

The central question remains the affirmation of color as poetic territory. Ana Raylander neither celebrates nor laments brown, but establishes it as an inescapable fact of Brazilian as well as universal social formation. The tonal variations present in the fabrics evidence that what is named as one is multiple in its manifestations, countering modern and colonial thought. Brown emerges as the color of earth, coffee, skin, tobacco — not as a mark of subjection, but as an affirmation of existence that transcends attempts at classification and control. Casa de Bené materializes centuries of reflection on how color, social tensions, and memory articulate in the present to produce possible futures through the power of historical understanding of color and its cultural and social influence as a transformative phenomenon of humanity.