In a time marked by conflicts that show us the most brutal face of humanity, the use of the word INVASION, applied to an arts and culture event, raises questions of complex significance. All wars have been, are, and will be tragic. We should therefore ask ourselves: can a tiny gesture of naming and baptising a Festival - the NEW INVASIONS FESTIVAL - contain a way of looking at the nature of the world and of human things that leads to an equation of reality committed to its actuality, which doesn't mean advocating the evils of war and a collective poetic invocation?
Between the craft of the arts and the plans of war, semantic bridges are established that have to do with the fact that the artist and the warrior serve each other as limits and processes of definition. The warrior seeks a distant ideal that lies beyond reason. It is an ideal that justifies war and the extermination of the other. It is a reason without reason that leads him to believe in a better future full of elements that bring well-being and the propagation of life as such. Be it more peace, more democracy, more presence of faith and the divine. The artist evokes other skies. The relationship that can be established between the warrior and the saint and the artist has always been intertwined and even necessary in their coexistence. We are, so to speak, at the limits of language, where the enunciated gesture becomes movement and performance towards the unknown. As the poet tells us: 'Love is a fire that burns without being seen'. What a contradiction, what an invasion of feeling. What a terrible sense of invasion, that of a bonfire, a fire that spreads inside or outside of us and that we can't see, can't locate, and can't put out, and that will inevitably lead us to the ashes of being.
Does this assumption of means and meanings that we have attached to a festival name signify a poetic condition? Yes. A festival today is a place to celebrate our time, its contradictions, the limited awareness of what we are and the world. To explore life and turn it into a poetic act is to propose that we use culture in all its dimensions of difference, of a social act of collective information. What we are proposing is a journey from which we return inspired, able to look at reality as a poem. To enter and leave the New Invasions Festival as if you were travelling to a foreign time, inspired and able to cleanse your eyes and heart and turn everyday life into a joyful poem. Where joy and poetry come together to explain in an initiatory way what is part of our deepest history.
So let us come here without trying to be exhaustive, or to constitute a definitive thesis on what we are trying to highlight. We have only come to try to shed more light and clarity on the choice of a name, which is always ambiguous in itself because it belongs to a being that unfolds in the field of existence. A name we chose to baptise an artistic and cultural organisation: the New Invasions Festival. The relationship between art and power, or art and war, art as an experience that resembles a battlefield or art and terror, has always been ambivalent. The feeling and sense of what we invoke in this invasion is that of existing.
But what possibilities do we have for experience in the intersecting times in which we live? What is deeply human about us that has made us the biggest predator on the face of the planet we inhabit? It's true that art, artists, all of us, above all need peace, emotional conditions and tranquillity in order to develop fully as living agents in the social fabric. And yet, war and its protagonists have historically always served as the purpose and theme of artistic work. Today, given the extreme media pace at which we live, where the role of immortality for the arts will have dissolved, this may no longer be the case. But the representation of the glory and suffering of war was, for a long time, a favourite theme of art. The division of labour between war and art was quite clear. The warrior did the actual fighting, and the artist represented that fighting by narrating or portraying it. The artist needed the warrior to have a subject for a work of art, but the warrior needed the artist even more. Only an artist could give the warrior fame and ensure posterity for generations to come. In a sense, the heroic action of war was futile and irrelevant without an artist who had the power to bear witness to it and inscribe it in the memory of humanity. Today, poets and ourselves: we are the warriors and the artists who bring both sides into one and thus solve this invasion of the dream and the real in our consciousness. As Fernando Pessoa tells us in his Ode Marítima, the cruel is born of the human and does not escape it. To question the time we live in, which is the sum of what has been inherited from the past, combined with the imagination that pulls us towards the future, balancing us in the present: it's taking risks. It's being able to combine tenderness and cruelty. To bring together intelligence and joy capable of lifting sadness from the streets and from the ground, to penetrate and invade indifference like a warrior artist seeking to bring beauty and fraternity into the light of days. Today we are all many things and there is a myriad of behaviours in each of us that require joviality, courage and a capacity for humility in order to build a future together where everyone can take part. Laughing and crying, thinking and contemplating, holding hands and fighting, are all facets of that infinite human being, of that contradictory, tautological, paradoxical, incomprehensible, provocative nature, of all that and much more, of that substance of dreams of which we are made. It is for these reasons that we argue that although the FNI has a name that refers to invasions, it is not a new invader in the sense of war, in the sense that this word contains if we only use it in its historical sense. It is more a provocation of the meanings of history, of our humanity and inhumanity, of thinking an ecology that we need to bring to consciousness. It is a provocation to the feeling and doing together, in community, that we propose to bring to the surface and to the streets of Torres Vedras. This is the dialogue we want and offer to those who visit us. We'll be back in 2025.
We commemorate to honour the memory of a past event and the people who lived through it. We celebrate to share that memory with others and turn it into a positive feeling for the community. On 20 October, as always, we commemorated the Lines of Torres Vedras and celebrated our National Day with you.
To those residents of Vila Franca de Xira who may have been alarmed by the presence of a gallant troop, armed with sabres, pistols and rifles, in front of the Museum of Neo-Realism, we want to assure you: the guard was one of honour, and their intentions were kind. Nor did the peasants who occupied part of the pavement pose any danger to public order, despite the sticks and pitchforks from which, for historical reasons, they are never separated.
They were there, along with many other friends of the Lines of Torres Vedras, to take part in the celebration of their National Day. The house was packed, as it is every year, and even Junot - who we didn't want to throw out 'with arms and baggage' - was invited to read us the testament he never wrote. Speeches were made, the Wellington Honour awards were handed out and a good wine from the region was enjoyed while people caught up on conversation.
This year, the Wellington Honours were awarded to the following people and organisations:
Environment and Sustainability - AIDGLOBAL, Action and Integration for Global Development;
Culture and Creativity - Grupo de Danças Históricas da Batalha do Vimeiro;
Accessibility and Inclusion - VOA Association - Inclusion for the Disabled;
Sports and Movement - Calhandriz Sports, Recreational and Cultural Club;
Promotion and Dissemination - Clive Gilbert.
Above all - and this is what remains every year, more and more - the past was honoured and the future of our region was celebrated.
The March of the Forts, which takes place in October and crosses the territory of the Lines of Torres Vedras over a 44km stretch, is now in its 17th edition, making it an honourable veteran. This year, the big novelty was its little sister, the Little March of the Forts, aimed at families and which, in its first edition, enlivened the 4 kilometres of joyful hiking with lots of activities.
Among the many brave marchers who, under a heavy sky, reached the top of the Serra do Socorro for a refreshing break, one group stood out: the bravest of the brave - the little participants of the 1st Little March - had the pride of a mission accomplished in their eyes. They don't count kilometres by the dozen, as older hikers do. But the many trees that, with the help of their parents and many equally generous friends, they have planted on a hill in the mountains are an excellent omen for our common future.
And while the participants in the March of the Forts set off on the second part of their epic, those in the Little March stayed right there, at the top of the mountain, learning how to operate a balloon telegraph from the time of the Peninsular War, with a contagious joy and a commitment that would have come in very handy two hundred years ago.