For several years, we have been working on transforming this festival into a meeting space. We have invested in its deceleration, enrollment, plurality and accessibility, seeking to place people and relationships at the centre. We have also sought to make it a space for creation and reflection, in which artists and spectators have the time to experiment and experience themselves.
Each transformation requires a different understanding of time and of what is an encounter. Time does not need to be a prison; it is we who construct it. And encounters do not all have to be successful and harmonious, if we wish to have discussions beyond the consensual. This is the moment we find ourselves in. We believe that a festival can be that time, in which to notice, to care for and to share can be verbs for a new world.
A table and a walk are the backbone of this edition. To the table, in the center of the meeting point, we bring questions which have emerged over the last two years, motivated by specific people, happenings and places. To the walk, we bring the availability to follow two women who walk in a pair, separated by an ocean and a mountain range of distance.
In addition, we bring: A woman with a life like any other, who emerges as her granddaughter´s object of reparation. A post-apocalyptic fiction which suggests a reconnaissance journey to some millennial limestone caves. A plant utopia which makes way for a wild juvenile paradise. A drone which flies over a village, and another, and another and, finally, comes to rest above a republican village. A woman who makes her body resonate and shatter the limits of the normative. An enchanted people that emerges from the forest and offers itself up to our gaze.
We observe-repair. We care. We Share.
Elisabete Paiva and Materiais Diversos team