FITEI 2026 at TMP

The first decades of the 21st century have been marked by a succession of crises that can no longer be considered in isolation. The climate crisis, forced migration, the persistence and reconfiguration of armed conflicts, the erosion of a shared sense of community, the depletion of the planet’s resources, and a growing mental health crisis all form a single field of tensions, where the human and the non-human find themselves simultaneously at risk and in a state of transformation.

 

It is within this unstable territory that FITEI—the International Festival of Iberian Expression Theater—has been grounding its thinking and practice in recent editions. More than merely reflecting the world, the festival seeks to create conditions for questioning it, summoning artists and audiences to a collective exercise in attention, listening, and critical imagination.

 

The warning signs are numerous and persistent. But it is precisely at this point of saturation that the possibility of displacement also emerges. Between the recognition of collapse and the insistence on hope, a space of friction is drawn where artistic creation can operate: not as an answer, but as a question; not as a resolution, but as an opening.

The theme of “Collapse and Hope,” which guides this 49th edition, is not presented as a fixed opposition, but as a field of forces in constant negotiation. While, on the one hand, it is impossible to ignore the processes of degradation and rupture that mark the present, on the other, it is in the persistence of practices, gestures, and imaginaries that the possibility of a future is re-engraved.

 

This year’s program is part of that movement. The co-productions and creations presented address urgent issues—from immigration to labor, from housing to memories of struggle, from forms of collective organization to historical and contemporary violence—without ever settling on a single interpretation. On the contrary, they propose mechanisms that destabilize, displace, and reconfigure the gaze, inviting the viewer to take an active stance.

 

At the same time, artistic and technical residencies affirm the festival as a space of expanded time, where the process takes center stage and where creation also happens through encounter, sharing, and experimentation. It is in this interval—between what is already known and what is still being sought—that new possibilities for thinking and doing are constructed.

The festival’s territorial scope, which spans different cities, reinforces its commitment to community engagement and connection. But this geography is also interwoven with another, more diffuse and porous one: that of international artistic networks, transnational collaborations, and digital presences, which expand FITEI’s reach and impact.

 

In this context, the commitment to accessibility—physical, intellectual, and sensory—and to mediation takes center stage. Not as an add-on, but as an integral part of the artistic experience itself. Creating conditions so that more people can access, participate in, and become part of this space is also a way to resist fragmentation and rebuild the common ground.

 

At a time when so many narratives point toward exhaustion, FITEI insists on creation as a practice of resistance and reinvention. Between collapse and hope, a space opens up—fragile, unstable, yet deeply necessary—where it is still possible to imagine, together, other ways of being and of making the world. — Gonçalo Amorim (Artistic Director of FITEI)