The Walk&Talk arts festival on São Miguel, the largest island in the Azores archipelago, has formally transitioned from an annual summer street art celebration into a biennial, running until 30 November with over 80 artists. Founded in 2011 by curator Jesse James, the event now features exhibitions, performances, excursions, talks, and educational programming across nine venues, including historic and architecturally significant sites such as Museu Carlos Machado and a former distillery turned contemporary art museum. The shift to autumn allows local school groups to participate, and the inaugural biennial is co-curated by Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy, Liliana Coutinho, and Claire Shea under the theme "Gestures of Abundance."
This transformation matters because it reflects a strategic move to deepen community engagement and extend the festival's cultural impact on a remote island often romanticized but isolated. By becoming a biennial, Walk&Talk gains more planning time and a longer exhibition window, enabling richer programming tailored to Azorean youth and international visitors alike. The event also highlights how small-scale, place-specific art initiatives can evolve into significant platforms for contemporary art, fostering connections between local traditions—like geothermal cooking—and global artistic practices, while addressing themes of abundance as relational density rather than excess.