Back in January we already talked about the twenty-eighth edition of the Brazilian biennial, anticipated as an innovative and cross-current event for the unusual choices that would have been, and have been, made. Therefore, for some time the São Paulo event has been rousing curiosity and, in fact, indiscretions on the reasons of such a singular organisation have not died down yet, on the contrary right now that the biennial is taking place polemics are hot and the suspects of a crisis seem to be confirmed by the response of the public and critics. 
This year the São Paulo Biennial is an art “non-exhibition”, considering how small the area dedicated the works is. In the light of the facts we wonder once again whether it is an aimed decision or a forced one, due to a simple lack of funding.
Since it was founded in 1951, the São Paulo Biennial has been the most important international art exhibition in Latin America, but after years of scandals for corruption and repeated lack of funding, the fate of the exhibition seems to be at risk.
The result is that this twenty-eighth edition, which opened on the 26th October and will end on the 6th December, is not the usual exhibition of works of art, but rather a meeting, a debate about the biennial and its future plans. Practically conferences, readings and performances analyse the origin, the mechanisms and the potentialities of the biennials with the intent to protect and revive this institution, which now with only a handful of works displayed seems to have reached the end of the line. The hypothesis of a crisis would be confirmed also by some art merchants and experts. “There is a huge question point in the air, the number of visitors coming from abroad has significantly fallen”, these are the words of the gallery manager from São Paulo Daniel Roessler, who described how in the last years various groups of the exhibition visited his gallery, but this year he is expecting only two or three. He was the one to suggest a comparison of the São Paulo Biennial with the Mercosur Biennial, founded in 1997 in Porto Alegre, explaining how the latter institution is more organised and is growing: “The local business community in the south of Brazil supports very much its local biennials, and while one is rising the other is in the doldrums ”.
The São Paulo Biennial is managed by a private foundation that lives on funding from communal, state and federal administrative institutions - as well as by a private niche – but funds are not guaranteed to arrive. Only eight years ago the lack of funding forced the Foundation to postpone the 2000 Biennial to 2002, causing also the resignation of many members of administration and the chief curator, Ivo Mesquia, then director of the Museum de Art Moderna of São Paulo. The scandals contributed to mining the trust of businesses, financers and art communities, straining the crux of the difficulty to find funds. The successors continued on this line: the then president of the Foundation Edemar Cid Ferreira was sentenced in December 2006 to 21 years in prison for bank fraud, then the president Manoel Francisco Pires da Costa was cautioned for employing relatives and for using members of the biennial personnel for personal aims, but then he was re-elected by the board of directors. Furthermore, it seems that curators, and other members of staff of the 2006 Biennial, were not paid until a month after the closing of the exhibition, and the catalogue was not printed out until not long ago, in fact, the Brazilian curators Paulo Herkenhoff, Adriano Pedrosa, Solange Farkas and others refused to take part in the twenty-eighth biennial.
In Autumn 2007 Mesquita, now curator of the Pinacotheca do Estado de São Paulo, accepted  the appointment as chief curator, after claiming that he would have been able to organise the exhibition with 5-6 million dollars, certainly a lot less than the twenty-seventh edition which cost between 12 and 15 million dollars, but actually he only had about 3.5 million, an insufficient amount to organise such an important event which corresponds only to a third of the balance of the 2007 Venice Biennial. Perhaps this inspired the idea to aim at a reassessment of the international event in a conceptual key, using the absence or at least the scarcity of works of art as a provocation. Indeed, polemically, the second floor, which is 250 metres long and the main exhibition area of the biennial pavilion built by architect Oscar Niemeyer, has been left empty. Renamed “The Void”, the non-exhibition has been condemned by artists who have felt deprived of the possibility to display their works; in fact shortly before the opening some of them had threatened to assault the pavilion.  Brazilian artist Jac Leirner released a statement to the magazine Frieze, claiming that the “absence of art in a biennial is felt like “a punch in the stomach”.
A radical and undoubtedly strong act on behalf of the biennial, from which we hope at least one result: perhaps this missed occasion for artists could even have a positive outturn, perhaps for once the choice to subvert a traditional operation, which is now taken for granted, could be useful to open up an interlude of reflection, both on the possibility of modernising the system, and on the reasons, consequences and remedies of a possible lack of funds.