After a decade of experimentation, research, and reflection, Walk&Talk - Arts Festival of the Azores, held annually since 2011 on the island of São Miguel, takes its first steps towards a Biennial format on a path that runs until 2025.

The maturation process of Walk&Talk, which stems from its capacity for reinvention and evolution, together with the intention to consolidate its role, more actively and steadily, in the questioning of contemporary artistic practices, are crucial elements that led to the decision to apply a Biennial model and format.

The transformation of Walk&Talk into a Biennial allows for the deepening of artistic research and the flourishing of the working conditions of the artistic and production teams involved, while also enhancing a collaborative context and the involvement of new partners and agents (local and from other geographies) given the more significant extension of time available. This is another opportunity for Walk&Talk to strengthen its relationship with the territory, simultaneously repositioning and expanding within national and international artistic circuits.

2023/2025 PROGRAM
The first Walk&Talk Biennial will take place in June and July 2025, with the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, as its epicenter. However, the path to the Biennial starts now: over the next two years, the project will unfold through artistic residencies, public actions and educational projects, exhibitions, performances, and music. The duration of the activities in time allows us to direct the thematic lines to be developed in the Biennial and to share a program under construction, open and plural, capable of welcoming proposals and establishing more sustained connections.

In the coming months, several artistic residencies will begin with the different teams of curators and artists invited to develop new commissions/projects for the Biennial, many of which in collaboration with Azorean researchers, scientists, and institutions. The residencies will be articulated with a program and mediative actions and invitations that seek to expand relations with local schools, agents, and audiences.

In June 2024 (one year before the Biennial), the path to the Walk&Talk Biennial will be officially open, with a start-up program, an intense weekend of seminars, performances, and excursions that contextualize the themes and main players of the Biennial.

In 2025, the first Walk&Talk Biennial will last seven weeks, and its program - as was the mark of the W&T festival - will extend over various locations in the city of Ponta Delgada and throughout the island of São Miguel (museums, galleries, academia, independent spaces, public spaces).

CURATORIAL TEAM
A programming and curatorial team are designing the Walk&Talk Biennial 2025 following the processes of communality that have been explored and put into practice over the twelve years of existence of Walk&Talk. This artistic team brings together several elements among artists, curators, and experts, and its growth is expected to be gradual, with the definition of the programmatic sections and axes leading to new invitations and collaborations. Like a rhizome, the programming of the first Walk&Talk Biennial is sustained based on a horizontal model that contains several autonomous branches, thus resisting to a hierarchical model, as has been characteristic of Walk&Talk.


ABOUT WALK&TALK
Walk&Talk emerged in 2011 as a manifestation of a generation looking for a space to express itself, eager to find new paths and bold enough to speak out. Throughout 12 editions (2011-2022), it looked at the island as a point of intersection and built alternative affective, cultural, and territorial geographies that imagined other centralities and relationships. From a peripheral place, Walk&Talk called the world to itself, making way for the recognition of new and diverse perspectives at a local and global level.

The path taken by the festival has inspired and generated other gestures and projects such as RARA and PARES, and culminated, in 2020, in the founding of vaga - space for art and knowledge, home to Anda&Fala, the cultural association that organizes the festival. Today, with a team that allows us to strengthen and develop continued work in the territory of the Azores, the space for reflection on the mission of Walk&Talk and its goals for the next decade is also expanded.

ABOUT ANDA&FALA
Anda&Fala is a non-profit cultural association that promotes new centralities for contemporary creation in the expanded field of visual arts, facilitating the production, presentation and circulation of knowledge, artists, and projects. Operating from São Miguel Island in the Azores Archipelago, it aims to involve communities from all over the world.