General Concept

With the mission of reducing cultural asymmetries, at local and national level, and reflecting on “centers” and “peripheries”, Periferias Festival becomes the epicenter of social reflections, through its programming. In recent years, just like Chão de Oliva – the entity that develops it – it has been redefined in conceptual and curatorial terms.

Although its structuring traits remain, we seek to introduce new ideas that distance it from the narrative of a differentiated festival due to its focus on Portuguese-speaking countries, even though it maintains privileged relations with them.

With this festival, we seek to assume a place of risk and commitment to experimentation and to a programmatic line that encourages artistic intersections, practices of reflection in dialogue with contemporaneity, promotion of interculturality and presentation of emerging artists alongside established ones.

It maintains as its main focus the fight against social exclusion and marginalization, democratizing culture in its territory by promoting access to artistic enjoyment for a diverse audience through accessibility practices (physical, intellectual, social) and by constant concern with decentralization (leaving Sintra’s town center where the cultural offer is concentrated and program for Sintra’s countryside and for Sintra’s urban reality).

In the four-year period 2023-2026, Periferias Festival will be in dialogue with the theme of each cycle of Chão de Oliva’s project, adding new reflections and questions, serving to problematize and deconstruct the festival’s own history and experience through activities parallel to the artistic programming.