São Luís Sound System Steals Show in São Paulo

“Not all Travellers Walk on Roads,” is the slogan of this year’s São Paulo Biennale. According to the curator, Berlin based biophysicist Bonaventura Soh Bejeng Ndikung,  the exhibition interrogates “humanity as a verb and a practice,” and illuminates “the clashes and negotiations when different worlds meet.” Biennales’ are inevitably a mixed bag, but in a time of dread, the sheer array and diversity of creativity and human invention is life affirming. The vast Fundação Bienal, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, stretches over four floors, and with over one hundred and forty contributing artists from around the world, it requires more than one visit. In the entrance, as if by design, stood what turned out to be one of my highlights; an illuminated fully functioning sound system. The artist Gê Viana specialises in audio-visual works that celebrate the cultural practices of marginalised Afro-Indigenous communities. Here, his focus was on the sound systems, radiolas, of São Luís de Maranhão, reggae capital of Brasil. If I had to choose a soundtrack to my adult life, then it would be reggae, and in particular dub, that I have been obsessively listening to for fifty years. Keith Hudson, Jackie Mittoo, Lee Perry,  Scientist, Augusto Pablo, Mad Professor, the immortal King Tubby, a list that is as illustrious as it is endless. Situated on the Northern Coast, I first visited São Luís twenty-five years ago. Colonised by the French, Dutch, and Portuguese and built by enslaved labour, I was unaware of Sao Luis’ sonic connections to Jamaica. Samba, Pagode, Forro, Funk, and MPB, is the everyday acoustic tapestry of Brasil. But in São Luís, the bars and back streets reverberate with a different bass heavy rhythm. Meticulously assembled from loop playing speaker boxes, framed photos, collages, and newspaper cuttings,  the installation is a shrine to the history of reggae as a form of cultural resistance and to the ingenuity of the radiola engineers.