Inaugural edition: Gestures of Abundance

Walk&Talk is excited to announce the inaugural edition of its biennial in the Azores, titled Gestures of Abundance. 

Taking place across the island of São Miguel between September 25 and November 30, 2025, this new iteration of Walk&Talk invites audiences to explore the abundant intersections of culture, ecology, and spirituality. Drawing inspiration from the unique landscapes and layered histories of the Azores, this first edition poses a transformative question: how might we shift our perception of scarcity to one of cooperative abundance?

The biennial looks into commonality and other ways of engaging with the political: dreaming, collaborating, instituting, negotiating spaces to live, and revealing concrete possibilities, myths, and hopes. These notions will guide the curatorial research and shape the programmatic structure of the biennial, influencing both the typology of activities and actions to be presented and the processes of inviting artists and other agents.

Curatorial and artistic teams
Curated and programmed by a communal network of artists, curators, and teams, Walk&Talk draws on collective intelligence to explore the creation, experience, and sustainability of artistic practices. This core team includes guest curators Claire Shea (Toronto, Canada), Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy (Dakar, Senegal), Liliana Coutinho (Lisbon, Portugal), artistic director and curator Jesse James (Azores, Portugal), working collaboratively and engaging creatively with the teams in the organization.

First confirmed artists
New commissions by 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, and co-productions with Hotel Europa and Os Possessos. 

More artists will be confirmed in the following months.

Open call to artists
Walk&Talk opens its curatorial process, inviting artists from all disciplines and geographies to share their thoughts. Two creation grants will be awarded, including an artist residency and presentation at the biennial. More information on our website soon.

Journey to the biennial
Since its founding in 2011 and over its twelve editions as a festival, Walk&Talk has brought together more than 500 artists, curators, and creators from different disciplines and geographies, fostering artistic creation deeply rooted in the archipelago's unique cultural and geographic context. 

In 2023, Walk&Talk began its transition from an annual festival to a biennial model. This journey has been informed by many meetings, residencies, and assemblies focused on processes that have and will continue to impact the research methodologies of the artistic teams and the way gestures unfold and may be felt over time. 

This process has been integral to defining the discourse of the biennial, allowing for a richer engagement with the territory and its communities. The biennial format not only lengthens the program's reach but also deepens its capacity to foster long-term projects and collaborations, with artistic residencies and development occurring in the "off" years, building towards each biennial edition.

Gestures of Abundance 
The Azores archipelago is often considered an ultraperipheral territory where the initial relationship is one of scarcity and absence and where much remains to be done regarding contemporary artistic practices. In the history of curating, we find various examples of how to work openly from a perspective of failure, from what is lacking. Shifting this approach and addressing what is present instead can be a way to rediscover not what is missing but what is in existence; that which is already there and perhaps even in abundance, and from here, weaving relationships that expand on a more common, shared reality of what exists or is still in potential.

Continuing the work developed by the festival that gave rise to it, the program of the first edition of Walk&Talk — Bienal de Artes will amplify the history of the diverse profusion of this place, framing it not as an ultraperiphery but as one of the possible centers from which the meanings of the worlds created by us can be grasped.

Throughout its history and still today, the archipelago has been a place of significant geostrategic importance, both regarding transatlantic crossings and military and ecological positioning. Its social and historical fabric is imbued with signs that make it an ecological ecotone between the African, American, and Eurasian continents and their cultures, spiritualities, and materialities. An intersection of oceanic and volcanic waters, it is a territory that continuously moves us between an immense horizontal expanse and the depth of history and the elements. Archipelagic worlds are in relation, as Edouard Glissant noted(1), in movement, transit, transmutation, and transfiguration, with many stories yet to be told and brought to embodied experience.

Rather than from a place of lack, Bienal Walk&Talk 2025 sets out from a position of great bio-cultural diversity, with a richness brought to the surface through work that considers and nurtures synergies and collective making and, through this, proposes the opening of possible futures.

(1) Concept found in Poetics of Relation and other works by the author.