From São Bento to SESC: Tracing the Roots of Hip Hop SP

At SESC 24 de Maio, downtown São Paulo hums with a different rhythm—less traffic, more backbeat. From the elevators to the top floor, the scent of vinyl, spray paint, and history leads you into HIP-HOP 80’sp – São Paulo na Onda do Break, a sensorial time machine curated by the people who lived the beats, bled the rhymes, and broke the silence long before Brazil knew what to do with Hip Hop.

If Brazil’s cultural canon has often erased or misrepresented the periphery, this show reverses the gaze. Here, the streets speak first. Curated by a multigenerational dream team—Os Gêmeos, KL Jay, Thaíde, Sharylaine, and Rooneyoyo—this exhibition is not just a retrospective; it’s a restoration of memory. It is São Paulo told in four elements: DJ, MC, Breaking, and Graffiti.

The Curators: Not Curators, But Architects of the Movement

This is not your usual museum team. It’s a lineage.

• Os Gêmeos, the twin brothers from Cambuci who began painting São Paulo’s walls in the late 80s, brought graffiti to the world stage—without ever turning their backs on their roots. Their yellow-skinned characters now dance through galleries in London and New York, but their soul remains urban Brazilian surrealism. At SESC, their work isn’t just art—it’s testimony.
• KL Jay, the DJ backbone of Racionais MCs, represents the beat-driven consciousness of an entire generation. He’s not just a selector of records—he’s a selector of memory. KL Jay’s corner of the exhibition hums with mixtapes, Technics turntables, and archival flyers from street battles that predate social media but shaped social movement.
• Thaíde, one of the first MCs to rhyme in Portuguese, stands as the voice of Hip Hop’s first local translation. His lyrics, once considered subversive, are now poetry of protest framed on the walls. You’ll hear his words not just in audio booths but see them printed in old zines and on the backs of T-shirts worn by teenagers today.
• Sharylaine, a foundational female voice in the scene, brings feminist energy to a culture too often flattened into machismo. Her section honors the unsung women who made space in battles, beats, and breakdance circles.
• Rooneyoyo, dancer and activist, injects kinetic memory into the show. His curation of the Breaking section brings floorwork and footwork into sculptural form—freeze frames of resistance.

A Street Becomes a Gallery, a Gallery Becomes the Street

What makes HIP-HOP 80’sp revolutionary is not just its subject but its scenography. This is not a sterile archive. It is a sensorial staging, an extension of the streets: subway tiles, boomboxes, train doors tagged in throw-ups, and a full reconstruction of the legendary Estação São Bento—where breakdancers in the 1980s turned a metro station into a dancefloor of defiance.

One highlight is the DJ booth installation designed with KL Jay’s original crates and turntables, complete with headphones and a soundscape of the mixtapes that scored São Paulo’s periferia. The tracklists—some handwritten, others typed on typewriters—remind visitors that Hip Hop was never just music. It was a method of survival.

Nearby, Thaíde’s rhyme books are encased like scripture. Beside them: footage of early TV Cultura performances, a grainy yet electrifying vision of rap breaking into Brazil’s national consciousness.

In the graffiti gallery, Os Gêmeos' early pieces are presented side-by-side with contemporary street works, revealing the evolution of São Paulo's visual language. One wall features a rotating digital mural where graffiti writers from the city’s current scene upload real-time tags—a living archive.

A Living Past, a Rhythmic Present

Unlike many exhibitions, this one doesn’t end in the gift shop—it ends in the “cypher circle” room, where guests can step onto a floor marked with vinyl break circles and participate. Whether it’s spoken word, dance, or freestyle rap, the invitation is clear: Hip Hop is not to be watched. It’s to be made.

Workshops, talks, and performances accompany the exhibition throughout its two-year run (until March 2026). Expect surprise appearances, live DJ sets, and community battles that echo São Bento but also reimagine it.

Legacy vs. Censorship: What the Plexiglass Doesn’t Show

And yet, as powerful and necessary as this exhibition is, it lives in sharp contrast to a darker reality just outside its walls.

HIP-HOP 80’sp is a monument to what Hip Hop has survived, but it also inadvertently shows what gets lost in the process of institutional acceptance: edge, urgency, now.

The system seems to prefer Hip Hop when it’s 40 years old and safe behind plexiglass, not when it’s still young, loud, and fighting for space in the street.

While these legacies are finally framed and celebrated, their descendants—funk MCs, drill artists, and peripheral youth—face censorship, persecution, and algorithmic erasure. Funk lyrics are used as evidence in criminal cases. Bailes are shut down by police. Social platforms mute Black voices under the guise of “community guidelines.”

There’s a tragic irony in the timing: the same institutions that now honor São Paulo’s breakdancers and rappers once criminalized their every move—and today, they do the same to their cultural heirs.

This exhibition tells the story of resistance. But the next chapter is still being written, often in courtrooms, in hashtags, in cracked phones held high at baile funks.

To truly honor Hip Hop, we must fight not only to preserve its history—but to protect its present.