Walk&Talk: Gestures of Abundance

In its inaugural iteration as a biennial, Walk&Talk transforms São Miguel, Azores, into a site of ecological, cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic encounter. Gestures of Abundance reframes the dialectic of scarcity and abundance, proposing abundance not as excess but as a condition of interdependence. It extends an invitation to engage with practices that generate rather than extract, connect rather than isolate, and listen rather than impose. 

Under the curatorial leadership of Jesse James, in dialogue with Claire Shea, Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy, and Liliana Coutinho, Walk&Talk positions the Azores as a locus of relational energy rather than a remote periphery. The archipelago, geologically poised at the junction of the North American, Eurasian, and African tectonic plates, becomes a metaphor and material for the forces of collaboration, community, and exchange that underpin the project. Drawing from the philosopher Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thought, Indigenous cosmologies, and relational practices, the curatorial framework asks, “How might we shift our perception of scarcity toward one of cooperative abundance?”¹ 1 - From Walk&Talk Gestures of Abundance’s curatorial essay.