The first time de Paula Souza visited the Bienal de São Paulo was on a school trip, he told Brazil’s TV Cultura, and a recollection of that visit informed his approach as a member of the curatorial team this year under chief curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. “How do we speak to an audience that isn’t thinking about contemporary art 24 hours a day? The most generous way, we thought, was to think of humanity,” he noted. Their response, under the title Not all Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, was a series of often largescale commissions that foregrounded ways of thinking about what it means to be a human, turning, in particular, towards 120-plus artists whose work touched on spirituality and non-Western cosmological thinking, including Nádia Taquary, Antonio Tarsis and Suchitra Mattei. De Paula Souza, who is also on the Curatorial Committee of the NESR Art Foundation in Angola, travelled to Tokyo in April to chair one of a series of global symposia that fed into the Bienal’s main programme.