The Materiais Diversos Festival promotes the meeting of different audiences and imaginaries around the arts (dance, theatre, music and performance) with thought, questioning actuality and fostering cultural participation as a condition for citizenship. Born in Minde, in 2009, it spread to Alcanena and Cartaxo (in 2013) and became one of the most representative projects for programming outside the large centres in Portugal, attempting to think and act from the places it originates. It had been occurring annually until 2017 and became a biannual event starting with its 10th edition in 2019.
From the 5th to the 15th of October 2023, the Festival Materiais Diversos will be in Alcanena and Minde with a program of dance, theater and music shows, installations and conversations. Slowing down and making people, places and processes visible are the mottos of the 12th edition of the festival.
On 25 April 1974, Celeste Martins Caeiro was walking through the streets of Lisbon with a bunch of red carnations in her hand. Celeste wasn’t a florist, she didn’t grow flowers, and even less did she have a garden, but she planted a sea of red carnations that sprouted from the tips of the guns of the military who were carrying out the revolution in Carmo Square that same day. Eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty days later, which is like saying 50 years, the image of those carnations is still thriving (but be careful, you have to look after it).
However, over the course of this time, the first carnation that Celeste offered from her hands has changed colour, altered its scent and wilted. It dropped its leaves, its corolla fell to the ground (corolla is the name given to all the petals) and lay down. It gradually shed its perfect, pompous image and became… organic compost! Then, multiple as it was in this new mass of molecules, it merged with the earth and generated new flowers: this is how freedom lives.
Diversos