Taking place across the island of São Miguel between September 25 and November 30, 2025, the first edition of Walk&Talk – Bienal de Artes invites the public to explore the abundant intersections between culture, ecology, and spirituality.
Inspired by the unique landscapes and layered histories of the Azores, this first edition, entitled Gestures of Abundance, poses a transformative question: how can we shift our perception of scarcity to one of cooperative abundance?
With curation and programming developed by a community network of artists, curators, and teams, Walk&Talk – Biennial of Arts draws on collective intelligence to explore the creation, experience, and sustainability of artistic practices. The core team includes guest curators Claire Shea (Toronto, Canada), Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy (Dakar, Senegal), Liliana Coutinho (Lisbon, Portugal), and artistic director and curator Jesse James (Azores, Portugal), working collaboratively and creatively with the organization’s teams.
Among the first names to present new commissions for 2025 are artists Alice Visentin, ANDLab, Candice Lin, Colectiva MALVA, Ebun Sodipo, Helle Siljeholm, Gala Porras-Kim, Janilda Bartolomeu, Joana Sá, Lucy Bleach, Mae-Ling Lokko, Maria Emanuel Albergaria, Meg Stuart & Forum Dança, Nadia Belerique, Resolve Collective, Uhura Bqueer & Soya the Cow, as well as co-productions with Hotel Europa and Os Possessos. More will be confirmed in the coming months.
The Azores Archipelago is considered an outermost territory, whose primary relationship is sometimes one of scarcity, and much remains to be done in contemporary artistic practices. In the history of curating, we find several examples of how to work openly from failure, from what is lacking. The exercise of changing this approach is necessary as a way of rediscovering, not what is lacking, but what is there, what already exists, even in abundance, and from there, weaving relationships that give more common, shared reality to what exists or is still in potential.
Continuing and extending the work developed by the festival of the same name that gave rise to it, the program for the first edition of the Walk&Talk Biennial will highlight the history of the diverse profusion of this place, through the gesture of looking at it, not in its ultra-peripheral dimension, but as one of the possible centers from which to grasp the meanings of the worlds we have created.
In other words, instead of scarcity, Gestures of Abundance starts from a zone of great bio-cultural diversity, whose richness can be brought to the surface by considering and nurturing synergies and common actions, thereby proposing to open up possible futures.
Through the program, we aim to analyze the notion of the common and other ways of engaging with politics: dreaming, collaborating, instituting, negotiating spaces to live, and revealing concrete possibilities, myths, and hopes. These concepts will guide curatorial research and shape the programmatic structure of the biennial, influencing both the types of activities and actions to be presented and the processes for inviting artists and other agents.
The curatorial process will also be opened up, inviting artists from all disciplines and geographies to share their ideas through an Open Call. The selected proposals will be awarded two creation grants, including an artistic residency and presentation at the biennial. In addition, there will also be an Open Call for programmers working in the Azores region. All details for participation will be announced shortly.
Walk&Talk — Bienal de Artes is a project by Anda&Fala — Associação Cultural, a structure funded by the Government of the Azores, the Portuguese Republic / DGArtes, and the Municipality of Ponta Delgada.
