SP-Arte Rotas 2026: Group Exhibition

Every Journey Begins at the Crossroads 

Mitre Galeria's proposal for SP-Arte Rotas is grounded in a premise:  a path is not formed despite encounters, but through them. To take the route as a curatorial principle is to understand the booth as a trajectory to be constructed, and every trajectory demands a threshold, a place of passage before which nothing takes place.

This threshold is a portal: twenty-one Exus sculpted by Sandro Ayê welcome those who arrive and establish the logic of everything that follows. In African cosmologies and across their diasporas, Exu is not merely a messenger between realms, but the principle that sets all existence into motion and transformation, the force that prevents the world from closing itself into a single truth. For this reason, his domain is not a place but a condition: the crossroads, understood less as a geographic intersection and more as a stance toward knowledge. This same logic governs the booth: to move through it is not to follow a single correct direction, but to accept that multiple logics may pass through the visitor simultaneously, without any needing to prevail over the others.

Alongside the portal, another temporality emerges: the photographs of Zumví — Arquivo Afro Fotográfico, from Salvador. Founded in 1990 by three young Black photographers from the city’s periphery, in a country still processing the end of a dictatorship, Zumví arose from a simple and urgent realization: there were almost no Black photographers documenting their own lives. Its name, a fusion of “zoom,” the lens that brings closer, and “vi,” the verb that bears witness, coincidentally echoes the name Zumbi, reinforcing what the archive has always been: a way of seeing that is also a way of resisting. Where Ayê invokes, bringing the invisible into material form, Zumví bears witness, fixing the everyday before it is overtaken by oblivion.

From this dual opening (invocation and testimony) emerge the directions pursued by the other artists in the booth, each in their own way. Ayla de Oliveira, davi de jesus do nascimento, Diego Mouro, Gê Viana, Hariel Revignet, Isa do Rosário, Juliana Matsumura, Luana Vitra, Marcos Siqueira, Pedro Neves, Wallace Pato work across different languages, yet all approach the artwork as something in transit, never as an endpoint. Some begin from raw matter, recognizing within it histories of labor and displacement; others depart from landscape, reinventing it at another scale; others still investigate ways of inhabiting the world that elude any closed narrative. What they share is a refusal to treat art as arrival. Every work here is, instead, a crossing: a place where one story meets others and continues on, transformed.

At SP-Arte Rotas, Mitre Galeria offers a path to be experienced. The portal, the archive, the research practices, each point gives rise to the next, and to visit the booth is less to observe than to surrender to its movement. To accept this invitation is to accept Exu’s: to refuse a single route is, ultimately, the only way to open all others.