36th Bienal de São Paulo Review: Pidginising the Biennial

Antonio Társis presents Orchestra Catastrophe: Act I (2025), a vast walk-through installation composed of matchbox panels glued into large planes, handcrafted leather atabaque drums, dangling hunks of coal suspended like pendants from the ceiling and speakers. Exploring the multiple cultural resonances of the matchbox – long central to his practice – Társis draws on its use as percussion by samba musicians in Salvador, like Mestre Batatinha, while confronting the relentless global extraction of mineral resources. Charcoal blocks threaded with cords crash against massive drums by automated systems, producing vibrations that course through the visitor’s body. Over time, the installation unravels: shards of coal placed atop upturned speakers tremble and splinter under deep bass, the sound of the exhibition’s space captured live and amplified through the speakers. The louder and more crowded the Bienal grows, the more the work devolves into noisy entropy. Társis’s inquiry zeroes in on the often-violent activity of mineral extraction in Africa – in Rwanda, Nigeria, Congo and Zambia – that fuels the global electronics industry. Each phone, each device that connects us, contains fragments of rare matter hewn from Africa, as well as China and Brazil. The Bienal’s curatorial vision of creating an estuary where dispersed communities fractured by the African diaspora might converge finds its perfect expression in Társis’s work – one of this edition’s strongest.