Gestures, group rituals, individual expressions, and commitments of an entire community have seldom struck me as those in the portraits of Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco have. Maybe it’s because I don’t trust everydayness in the arts anymore. Maybe there is too much discursiveness blocking all sense of reality. And that is what my gaze reproduces at first sight: Laudalino’s portraits, which echo Richard Avedon’s black-and-white precision, Anton Corbijn’s filmic sensibility, William Eggleston’s everydayness, Khadija Sajés traces of objectification and mystification in photography and Francesca Woodman’s oneiric intimacy, and, as I recognize myself doing this, they start to fade away and my body returns to the former Jesuits building, now the Museum Carlos Machado. The cycles of life and death – from birth to wakes, funerals, weddings, anniversaries, and everything in between – emerge as a graspably unique, granular texture of a moment that is not defined by photography, but rather the other way around.
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Maria Emanuel Albergaria, Margarida Medeiros, and João Leal have built an exhaustive exhibition. However, the display in Ponta Delgada barely scratches the surface of the 8,000 photographs Laudalino took during the 1960s and 70s. Primarily focused on his parish of Maia, Laudalino’s images reflect the photographic aesthetics of the time while embodying an anthropological sensitivity to the every day: images of adolescents sewing a white cloth in a field of cabbages, children playing on soil, farm workers resting under the sun, a boy cutting a pig’s head, or a girl taking her first eucharist. These moments resonate with photography’s inception as both representation and historical document, a mode of citation – recording, collecting, reframing – a notion that Eduardo Cadava traces back to Walter Benjamin’s thinking on history.
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Laudalino evokes this tradition while remaining outside of it. However, his practice is not peripheral. Rather, it straddles amateur and professional photography, transcending Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “decisive moment” through sheer continuity and multiplicity, open to every gesture in every portrait, whether staged or ephemeral. Pierre Bourdieu’s Un art moyen reminds us of photography’s enduring social function, vernacular or artistic, as a mirror of societal values. Laudalino’s portraits connect to reading because the people in these images are not an extension of the material or the device, and I am in awe of the difference it makes. It also makes me very sad that we seem unable to escape this categorization state. Laudalino eludes this, and in this paradox lies the power of his images. They are fragments of everyday life that elevate its collective significance, offering us a way to see the mundane as essential, not as particularity.
It is here that I find the lens with which to interpret Walk&Talk’s curatorial vision: art as part of life, not a separate sphere, not sanctified through discourse, but vice versa. Art as a stroll along Atlantic shores, a conversation in the park, as a jointly cooked and shared meal. It might read as redundancy, but how dire it is to meander these days in discursivity without making thoughts graspable? Like Laudalino’s archive, Walk&Talk refuses to tokenize locality while simultaneously creating a living archive of the Azores. The biennial does not merely document the every day; it amplifies, distorts, and rehearses it. And it has allowed me to traverse my intellectual pettiness to arrive at conversations that are seemingly obvious here, and uncannily natural.
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From Archiving to Living: Permanently Restless
Laudalino’s textures align perfectly with the considerations of Walk&Talk’s upcoming edition. The festival, a biennial since last year, mirrors his photographic method by foregrounding rituals, assemblies, and shared spaces as integral to its curatorial framework. Yet Walk&Talk’s living archive moves beyond documentation: it transforms collective action, local traditions, and relational gestures into forms of contemporary art practice. At its inception, Walk&Talk sought to democratize art through public interventions. Ponta Delgada became an open-air gallery, showcasing works by artists such as Cyrcle, Clemens Behr, Okuda, and Hyuro. These early interventions prioritized visibility and accessibility, reflecting the festival’s mission to engage residents directly. The act of inserting art into the public sphere challenged the peripheral status of the Azores, positioning the region as a site of artistic production rather than one of mere consumption.
A significant shift occurred around 2016 when Walk&Talk pivoted from focusing on public art toward deeper site-specific practices. The territory itself became the medium, a platform for artistic encounters that engaged with the land, its history, and its people. This evolution mirrors broader artistic trends: moving from works about place to work with place, from visual display to lived participation. The choice of the public realm as the stage for the festival to evolve reflected the organizers’ democratizing intent to engage directly with residents and visitors alike. As the festival matured, its scope diversified, and at the same time, it returned to local traditions. From the ceremonial pig slaughter, loaded with cultural significance and shared labor, kinship radiates through generations to how Walk&Talk’s commitment to redefining how we perceive art and culture. Originally conceived by Jesse James and Diana Sousa as a modest, yet daring plan to bring contemporary art to the Azores, the festival’s collective immediately grew with a sense of common purpose and through urban interventions, most notably a mural by the SpY collective: No (More) Walls.
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Vítor Belanciano contributes to the catalogue of the festival with an examination of the evolution and significance of the festival’s trajectory since 2011, which he got to know as a visiting journalist, experiencing it as an exemplary case study for how small-scale, interdisciplinary artistic initiatives can transform territories while remaining deeply engaged with urgent global issues. He, too, thinks of Pierre Bourdieu when, in light of the pandemic, which amplified feelings of isolation, Walk&Talk rethought its institutional models, pairing vulnerable structures with powerful ones, the small-scale with the large-scale, and hierarchical with horizontal initiatives, all based on shared conceptual affinities. Bourdieu’s analysis of the center-periphery dynamic explores how the cultural periphery often seeks legitimacy through difference while engaging in power struggles specific to given contexts. Embracing collective action, as Bourdieu advocates, requires cultural producers to better communicate and understand differences, defending art’s autonomy against the encroachment of capital and fostering collaboration among institutions, artists, and intellectuals in public debates.
The term “rehearsal” captures Walk&Talk’s essence as a propedeutic relational layer, that is a process of preparation and experimentation leading towards its transformation into a biennial. The festival serves as a rehearsal ground for collective artistic methodologies that center on hospitality, participation, and negotiation. Hosting becomes an active methodology, not just an aestheticized act. The pig slaughter in Laudalino’s images, for example, resonates with themes of labor, ritual, and kinship that are, again and again, the center of conversations at Walk&Talk. Local tradition and contemporary narratives become part of a broader relational framework, assembling participants for a collective experience. Events, for example, the lunch at Casa do Povo, Jokko Collective’s music performances, and communal bus rides are not mere art-tourism spectacles, but rehearsals of togetherness. These gatherings dismantle host-guest hierarchies, positioning everyone as participant-contributors.
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Yet Walk&Talk does not naively replicate ruangrupa’s “make friends, not art” mantra. While the festival embraces hospitality as a curatorial principle, it does so critically, acknowledging the tensions inherent in collective assemblies. It challenges dominant art-world logic by proposing non-hierarchical modes of cultural production and resisting centralized institutional power. Walk&Talk is not only dedicated to nurturing inclusivity and representation – particularly for the queer community, which Jesse James proudly belongs to – and promoting civic engagement in a region still grappling with stigmatization. This sociocultural impact underscores how the festival has not only transformed physical spaces but also influenced attitudes and behaviors, positioning the Azores as a site of contemporaneity and renewal, far away from the seasoned hotspots of cultural and political confrontation.
The Propaedeutic Layer: Landscapes as Stages of Rehearsal
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, São Miguel stands as a dense interruption – a volcanic fragment, both isolated and connected. This geological thrust from the earth holds stories of extraction, migration, and resilience, with every stone seemingly bearing the weight of collective labor. Standing at the edge of Lago Sete Cidades, amidst rain and rainbows, we heard local geologists answer in their own terms curatorial questions for an upcoming exhibition: how can we perceive abundance in a place where scarcity has long been assumed? What can collective processes – marked by failures and recoveries – teach us about negotiating life, space, and imagination? The land itself offers its testimony: places of rest by the sea, the violence of geological extraction sites, and the weight of walls built stone by stone.
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Walking becomes a medium for understanding, moving through both the terrain and the ideas that it holds. The journey unfolded in layers; at the thermal baths in Caneiros, we were enveloped in mineral waters rising from deep within the earth, sparking quiet conversations about labor, collective fatigue, and the trial-and-error evolution of Walk&Talk since its inception. Last year, Walk&Talk began transitioning from a festival to a biennial format, seeking to reimagine futures and reflect on models, practices, and alliances. I realized that the journey towards the Biennial was shaped by Virgílio Varela's optimistic call to envision collective futures rooted in joy, transformation, and abundance. Far from being idealistic, it challenged my assumptions: can abundance truly emerge without acknowledging tensions and discomforts?
Under the curatorial direction of Claire Shea (Toronto, Canada), Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy (Dakar, Senegal), Liliana Coutinho (Lisbon, Portugal), and Jesse James (Azores, Portugal), the biennial will emerge as a communal effort to navigate, map, and narrate the relationships of the ultraperipheral, reaching far beyond the picturesque framework I have described here. Their proposal is rooted in worlds that intersect, sediment, and transmute via individual and shared invisibilization. It made sense, therefore, to see members of the Jokko Collective spend time with everyone and play music on the night of our arrival. The gatherings, bus rides, and free lunch at Casa do Povo all serve as preparations for the new commissions for 2025 which will be proposed by artists such as 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.
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Landscapes are never neutral. They carry the traces of labor and dispossession, the cumulative histories of those who dug, carried, or simply laid against their warmth. In much the same way, Shea, Sy, Coutinho, and James draw on the layered, often contentious, histories of their respective environments, united by a commitment to challenging conventional narratives and fostering inclusive dialogues. Shea’s work, unfolding in the Fogo Islands and Hong Kong, is grounded in social activism and emphasizes identity, belonging, and marginalized voices. Sy, based in Dakar, foregrounds African contemporary art, blending traditional and modern practices to decolonize the cultural landscape. Coutinho’s curatorial work in Lisbon centers on memory, history, and the power of the archive, inviting critical reflection through experimental art. Meanwhile, James, with a focus on the Azores, creates immersive, site-specific exhibitions that integrate local traditions and landscapes, fostering deeper engagement with ecological and societal issues. Together, they embody a diverse, innovative approach to curating that emphasizes cultural exchange, critical discourse, and the reimagining of artistic and societal boundaries.
The physical heart of the festival, Vaga – the exhibition space born from the pandemic – hosts Magmatic Bodies, curated by Marta Espiridão, a longtime collaborator of Walk&Talk, and produced under the Nova Vaga Award. The exhibition explores how Isabel Medeiros, Joana Albuquerque, and Sofia Rocha understand the friction between place, body, and belonging. Touch is the central theme: What happens when a hand wraps around a stone? When skin brushes against the textured earth? Approaching such questions, the artists highlight the intimacy of these encounters, insisting that geology is not just a matter of science, but of history and memory. Their residency in São Miguel took them to sites where these relationships were most vivid: hot sulfuric lakes that relax all muscles, fissures where water erupts from rock, and quarries where stone is severed from the earth and displaced for construction labor. The works suggest that to hold a stone is to grip the past, compressed, crystallized, and carried into the present. The artists transform landscapes into bodies, and bodies into volcanoes, with the exhibition space revealing these transfigurations.
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Accumulated frustration from a year of dire and brutal polarization in the midst of the rise of authoritarianism around the world meant I was met with something more enduring during my stay in the Azores: a sense of shared possibility – fragile but urgent, and ultimately abundant in its capacity to redefine what artistic and social collaboration can achieve. The call to “exist as practice” remains a turning point over a weekend filled with the unexpected, a reminder that abundance is not something to find only within capitalistic logic, but something to build, together, from within oneself, holistically. To focus on abundance is to focus on contradictions, at least in the Azores, a territory shaped by colonial histories, capitalist incursions, and profound ecological beauty.
The archipelago's geographical position made it a critical node in transatlantic trade routes, embedding it within systems of imperial extraction and exploitation that continue to reverberate through its economy and social fabric. These routes, which connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas, were key conduits for the transatlantic slave trade, human lives commodified, uprooted, and violently displaced to fuel colonial economies. The Azores served as both a waypoint and a participant in this system, where enslaved Africans were forcibly transported, traded, or worked on plantations that fed imperial powers with goods such as sugar and wine. The scars of forced migration, monocultural agriculture, and the militarization of its landscapes reveal how deeply entangled the Azores remain within histories of empire and global power dynamics. And yet, rather than romanticize or reject this complexity, the Biennial aims to inhabit it, working with the material and immaterial landscapes that are already there, acknowledging the contradictions while reimagining them as fertile ground for new forms of solidarity, creation, and coexistence.
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- Image credits
Cover: SpY, Nomorewalls ©SaraPinheiro
fig. 1: © Herdeiros de Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco / Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Divino Espírito Santo da Maia
fig. 2: Centriphery, A Walk on The Edge. Walk & Talk 2022. Photo by Mariana Lopes
fig. 3: Alexandre Farto (Vhils), Scratching The Surface. Walk & Talk 2013. Photo by Rui Soares
fig. 4: Nadia Belerique, Walk & Talk 2021. Photo by Sara Pinheiro
fig. 5: © Herdeiros de Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco / Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Divino Espírito Santo da Maia
fig. 6: Excursão #3, Walk & Talk 2022. Photo by Mariana Lopes
fig. 7: Centriphery, A Walk on The Edge ©Claudio Oliveira
fig. 8: © Herdeiros de Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco / Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Divino Espírito Santo da Maia
fig. 9: Excursão #4, Walk & Talk 2022. Photo by Mariana Lopes
fig. 10: Centriphery, A Walk on The Edge. Walk & Talk 2022. Photo by Mariana Lopes
fig. 11: © Herdeiros de Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco / Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Divino Espírito Santo da Maia
fig. 12: Excursão, Walk & Talk 2021. Photo by Sara Pinheiro
