São Paulo, October 3-9, 2025

São Paulo:

A shifting composition.

Its skyline towers above relentless streets,

Layered with histories—

Some celebrated,

Others quietly fading.

The city wears a new mask,

But beneath it,

Fragments of forgotten time

Press through cracks in facades

That refuse to disappear.

Each day blurs into the next.

Modernist towers rise above colonial ruins.

Construction sites lean against public housing.

Murals fade behind billboards,

Slowly,

As if erasing themselves.

The pace dissolves boundaries,

And suddenly,

You stop trying to grasp every moment.

You absorb fragments—

Stacking unevenly in memory.

A palimpsest:

Modernism overwriting colonialism,

Informality layering protest,

The past lingering,

Like faint,

Erased text,

Still bearing meaning.

The city itself is a palimpsest—

And in a way,

So are you.

Marked by layers of experience:

Some vivid,

Others ghostly.

The city has already made plans for you.

It claims its wanderers,

Leads them into the unknown—

To forgotten architecture hiding in rubble,

Where faded signs whisper stories,

Of lives long passed.

The city decides

What is noticed,

What is missed,

What remains misunderstood.

The Biennial unfolds,

Like a careful composition—

Its spaces calm,

Deliberate,

Curated.

One of the world’s most influential exhibitions,

It speaks in bold tones:

Justice,

Land,

Belonging.

But outside its walls,

The city speaks louder.

Questions echo through traffic,

Through street vendors,

Broken sidewalks,

Soft voices,

Under concrete overpasses.

Who gets to ask these questions?

Who gets to answer them?

São Paulo wasn’t a backdrop—

it was a force.

The city taught without permission.

It resisted capture.

Modernism and formality

sit side by side,

Arguing in silence.

Here,

Architecture is not a product—

It is a condition.

Sometimes defiant,

Sometimes undone.

We crossed no visible boarders-

But many remained:

Political,

Economic,

Unspoken.

Some voices we missed entirely.

Others we misheard.

Still others,

refused to translate themselves

For us.

Home:

Back to uniformity,

Precision,

Repetition.

São Paulo already feels distant—

Like a dream fading too fast.

Within 36 hours,

Fluorescent light hums overhead

Photos scroll by,

Barely unrecognizable.

A new layer presses,

over the vibrant chaos carried back—

A palimpsest of memory:

Vivid,

Fading,

Lingering,

Like a quiet ache,

Beneath the surface.

Had I studied architecture?

Or just passed through it?