Werewere Liking: Of Spirit, Sound, and the Shape of Transmission

Listen. Not just with your ears, but with what artist-performer Werewere Liking calls les oreilles de l’intérieur (the inner ears). The ones that hear what the hands feel, what the canvas murmurs, what the spirit remembers. At the 36th São Paulo Biennial, this call to expanded perception – from vision as vibration, to image as invocation – unfurls across Liking’s offering: a constellation of paintings, sculptures, sound, and a performance rooted in théâtre rituel, an approach the artist developed using inspiration from gestures and healing rituals.

Each artwork is alive with multiple voices. The painted sculptures, the sculpted paintings, and the poems sung and spoken form an ecosystem of memory and resonance. Viewers wearing headphones encounter each piece not in silence, but through sound compositions mostly based on Liking’s poetry. Five objects and five soundscapes: from the haunting cadence of Les Usuriers des Serments, a triptych exploring the weight of promises and the responsibilities they entail, to the invocation of the mythic Senufo bird, a keeper of wisdom in Les Descendants du Kalao. A small glowing canvas paid homage to late African art collector Eric Robertson, a mentor through whom Liking learned to read codes of ancestral form.

The installation doesn’t merely display objects but invites communion. Audiences nod, then sway, then dance. “I wanted a plural gaze,” Liking explains, “not just from what we see, but from what we often hear inside ourselves.” This approach dissolves hierarchies between medium and senses. Painting becomes poetry, sculpture sings, music takes shape.

The performance took place on September 7 alongside the installation. Conceived in collaboration with Lamine, a pupil of the Village Ki-Yi in Abidjan who accompanied Liking to São Paulo, as well as four Afro-Brazilian slam poetesses and a musician – Midria, Janaina Silva, Luz Ribeiro, and Bia Ferreira respectively. It unfolded as an improvised ritual, moving in waves, a shared breath between elders and emerging voices. If the installation opened a space of dialogue between disciplines, the performance extended that dialogue across generations and geographies.

This intergenerational interaction echoed the biennial’s broader curatorial arc. At a moment when cultural memory is fractured by urgency, extraction, and spectacle, Liking’s work insists on care, relation, and the slowness of transmission. A strong resonance can be found with Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, whose ecstatic musical performance at the biennial on September 8 also embodied théâtre rituel, as a communal healing ceremony anchored in love and the act of gift-giving. Campos-Pons’s vision proposing forms of cultural continuity characterized by affection, reciprocity, and shared presence, converse with the ethos that Liking has cultivated throughout her life-long project, the Village Ki-Yi.

Now in its fortieth year, Ki-Yi is not simply a training ground. It is a breathing institution, a community space, a home and vessel of ancestral knowledge. Over the past year, it has nurtured and mentored hundreds of artists, including nationally and internationally acclaimed figures like Dobet Gnahoré and Didi B. The fortieth anniversary celebration will culminate in December 2025 with an international colloquium and a harvest ritual – a way to reflect, sow, and begin again.

In both São Paulo and Abidjan, Liking reminds us that art is a portal. Each creation is alive, inseparable from the gestures, sounds, silences, and spirits that surround it. It demands reverence and listening – not only to what it says, but to what it activates in us. At a time when ancestral epistemologies and knowledge still struggle to find their rightful place, Liking’s work is insurgent. It does not seek to preserve the past but to reawaken its frequencies through the bodies, tongues, and visions of the present.