What might moments of calm and quiet look like amidst the bubbling and buzzing effervescence gathered around an event like the Bienal de São Paulo? What spaces of collective rest could be envisioned, and how could they shape the audience’s experience as their bodies swarm and sway across the alleys full of artworks?

As a response to the curatorial statement of this year’s edition of the Bienal, Nigerian-American artist Precious Okoyomon proposes an installation titled Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me (2025), a piece that spatially reappropriates and reconfigures part of the Cicillo Matarazzo Pavilion. Known for their bold and imposing installations, Okoyomon’s practice lies at the intersection between poetry, food, and installation, merging sound with living and decaying materials such as rocks, plants, trees, and moss, among others. Effortlessly moving within several disciplines, Okoyomon wears several hats, sometimes acting as a visual artist, poet, chef, composer, and film director among others, with poetry and words acting as the red thread. As the artist often expressed in several interviews, most of the poems were written before they started making objects, and these poems have formed the seeds of their artworks.

Highlighting the vulnerability of our human condition and the complex, intricate, and inextricable relationship we share with other-than-human entities, Okoyomon, in this commissioned piece, applies a metaphorical lens to the cerrado desert and its seemingly chaotic and fragile ecosystem, drawing parallels between one of Brazil’s largest biomes and humanity. Chaos here, as often ascribed to nature or humanity, does not refer to some sort of cacophony or disorder. Rather, it refers to the symbiotic and unpredictable relationships resulting from the multiple and interdependent encounters between the different animate and inanimate beings, which likewise form the backbone of the cerrado and our societies. What Édouard Glissant refers to as the Chaos-Monde1 in his reappraisal of cultural choc and encounters.

Echoing the famously known Pidgin English adage “Bodi no be fayawood,” the piece Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me also emphasizes the need to embrace rest and refuge as a productive site, particularly in a world constantly evolving and paced by the capitalistic enterprise.

–Billy Fowo