“Meaning is buried deep down in dream language the way a figure is buried deep down in a mysterious drawing. The origin of mysterious drawings can even be found in that same vein: like an oneiric stenogram.”[1]

Dreams often ripple out in waves, like stones tossed into a pond. We hunt for meaning among the stimuli we encounter, remembering the fuzzy scenes flashed through our minds the night before. One thing leads to another. Studying these imagination glimpses is a way of broadening our emotional perception, finding out things we never knew about ourselves and sharpening our relationship awareness with the world. Dreams are also desires manifesting themselves.

Thumbing through the first couple of pages of the recently launched Walk&Talk 2011-2022: what you don’t know is worth discovering, the experience of hearing the waves crashing on the Azorean rocks immediately emphasises the project’s sensory nature. Published by Miguel Mesquita and designed by vivóeusébio, the catalogue celebrates 12 years of Walk&Talk and draws to a close its cycle as the Festival de Artes dos Açores. The editorial venture features 982 images and 10 texts, divided around the key concepts behind Walk&Talk’s definition and guidance, outlining the festival’s essence in five chapters: Territory, Peripheral Centralities, Community and Communality, Affective Network and Fault Space.

Can you tell us a bit more about the catalogue development? What was it like turning the festival’s history into this object-book?

Miguel Mesquita – Right from the start, the ultimate goal and the greatest difficulty for me was to succeed in converting so many things, sensations and emotions into pages. It was challenging because, in essence, we are aware of the unbelievable amount of works, expressions and participations covered by the festival and, more importantly, all the experience and togetherness that we managed to embody. The process involved revisiting and relearning several of these projects, understanding how to tie them to certain themes and extending them beyond that, offering a relationship logic in which we could perceive that each one of them actually operates autonomously, but they do so because they are part of the festival’s dynamics and energy. The idea was to bring that energy into the catalogue, making people feel like they were inside Walk&Talk, returning to the festival and experiencing moments through images, thus not only cataloguing the projects, but also a memory.

Jesse James – Miguel carefully arranged the images. His atlas is built on these five ideas (five chapters); as they are not chronological, the associations also stem from imagination, not just colour and form. Many come from fairly wide-ranging projects and relationships, contributing considerably to the way in which we travel through the festival’s history. Someone said that it seems like one is dreaming, or in a waking moment, when one starts thinking about one thing and suddenly goes to another, even things that are unrelated. Ailton Krenak frequently speaks on the power of association and how it can also be a form of mending the world, as it creates compositional spaces. This is something highly meaningful to me in the catalogue: people draw on their own associations. Miguel has, In his own way, continued this imagination and fantasy field that the festival always occupies, I wonder if consciously, but in some way it seeks it out.

M.M – We can see different dynamics in the catalogue inherent to the festival which, to a certain extent, were hard to capture. Many things were intuitively built, but they were also done intentionally to set up situations that would lead people to the table of contents, where the projects are explained, and understand the relationship between them. The catalogue was conceived to have different reading layers, each chapter develops its own identity, which required the literary aspect to be brought into the book through the images. This is why it was also very interesting to invite Gustavo Ciríaco to do the ISTMO essay, allowing many of the notions to be amplified and handled by that tool. This way, we enter even more into a dreamlike perspective, altering the relationships established by considering and experimenting with others. It also encourages people to read and act on things, because they are not just faced with an already locked object. The festival offers a continuous space for reflection, repositioning and collaborative development, and we needed to portray this in the catalogue.

The festival’s numerous transformations and reverberations have led to a lively art scene in the Azores today. We have witnessed the birth of collectives such as Atelineiras and CARALAVADA, the latter of which curated Isabel Medeiros’ exhibition Do tempo e das nuvens, recently held at Museu Carlos Machado, for instance. Azorean artists who participate in the festival keep developing their projects and initiatives, strengthening their own relationships, whilst maintaining the support of Anda&Fala. How do you see the influence of Walk&Talk on the archipelago’s current wave of artists?

J.J – The festival introduced another way of making and thinking about art in the region. We have seen this shift take place. I think the major difference is the interest in doing things collectively. There was a need to work together right from the start, not least because of insufficient resources. The subsequent generation – many of whom were our volunteers, having worked for Walk&Talk, Tremor, Imprópria and a range of other projects – got used to this kind of approach and, for them, it was the only viable way to accomplish their projects, making them more relevant, especially in a region where funding is scarce and political support for these networks and ways of working is limited. I think they discuss each other’s work much more than the generation before us and, as well as encouraging, they question each other’s output from different perspectives, whether they are more formal, conceptual or process-based.

M.M – This drive to catalyse is crucial, but so is the awareness that we have a vested responsibility and an active role in public engagement and commitment to civil society. This is a genuine concern of the festival and is felt by these new generations, as we can see in the text Afetos como Coletividade | Coletividade como Futuro by António Neves Silva. You can sense the concern of those taking part in the conversation that leads to the text about the unconditional support of an organisation and a group of people, who constructively participate in their process, who provide this opportunity to experiment and who support them as they grow. This entails a great deal of generosity when creating new structures, and it also involves the awareness not only of considering other projects to expand, but also of looking after those that are already there, the associations that already exist. This is key to a healthy relationship system.

Looking ahead, we know that the festival will adopt the Biennial format, taking place in June and July 2025. What can we expect from this new Walk&Talk era?

J.J – We have been working on the Biennale for a year, whilst simultaneously developing the catalogue, and that has been extremely useful for us to think about Walk&Talk in its new format, to picture what it will be, to consider what is important to preserve in this second stretch of the journey and what we have revamped from the first 12 years. One thing is the drift, this dream place, a very important aspect when the festival began, closely associated with our age at the time. However, keeping this alive is important, and we are realising that this is achieved through an intergenerational relationship and presence at the Biennial, within the structure that will shape and structure it, since this dreaming and reminiscing place also stems from encounters and moments in a person’s life. This step was extremely important for us, to understand all this stone-throwing and the movements it was generating – in us, but also in others and in the surrounding structures. Now we actually experience a deliberate action. Back then we might not have had the words, names or concepts for it, but there were already many elements guiding us. Now we have ideas, authors and perspectives that help us ground this action and start from a different position: responsibility and expectation in what we present. I think the Biennial and this second moment of Walk&Talk will be even more centred on how to think from the place, and how to situate this in the world. As an institution, we can suggest a way of looking at what this entity is. Anda&Fala functions in co-operation, in relation to the whole, as part of this ecosystem, this biome, which will only be stronger, more enduring, robust and relevant when the ecosystem around it is too.

[1] Benjamin, Walter. (2020). Sonhos. Sr. Teste.