The program Flux of Images / Imaginaries, presented within the 36th São Paulo Biennial, proposes more than cultural exchange: it attempts a decolonial gesture, a re-mapping of visual narratives that bind Brazil to the Caribbean and West Africa. Curated under the umbrella of the France-Brazil Season, it risks being read as diplomatic protocol—but within the Biennial it takes on a sharper resonance, asking how cinema can destabilize centuries of imposed representations.

This is not simply a celebration of “shared roots.” Instead, the films confront the fractures left by colonialism: displacements, forced migrations, hybrid identities, and the tension between memory and erasure. The Caribbean and West Africa do not appear as distant cultural echoes of Brazil, but as active interlocutors that question what Brazil has chosen to remember and what it insists on forgetting.

Yet, there is also a paradox. While the program seeks to decentralize the European gaze, it remains embedded in French cultural diplomacy, supported by the Institut français and the Embassy of France. Can a project framed by these institutions fully escape the very colonial histories it critiques? The Biennial offers no easy answer, but perhaps that is its strength: the contradictions are laid bare, forcing us to witness the entanglements rather than smoothing them into celebratory harmony.

Flux of Images / Imaginaries reminds us that cinema is not neutral. It can be a weapon of erasure or a tool for reimagining worlds. Here, it functions as both a mirror and a fracture: exposing Brazil’s unfinished colonial history while connecting it to the broader diasporic struggles of the Atlantic. The challenge, and the urgency, lies in transforming these dialogues into more than symbolic exchanges, into material practices of solidarity and cultural repair.