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"Fim do Mundo" Festival in São Tomé and Príncipe
The Islands that Think the World
We are living in a time when the centers are collapsing and the margins are discreetly acquiring density. Island territories, so often seen as exotic or peripheral, have become places of observation and testing. Places where the world reveals itself, not as a whole, but as a fragment in tension. From this context, the Fim do Mundo Festival in São Tomé and Príncipe is conceived – neither as an apotheosis nor a diagnosis, but as a possibility for listening, situated thinking, and linking cultural practices and ecological awareness.
"Heal, Eat, Postpone": three verbs that suggest minimal grammar for getting through the present tense. The conference cycle Alterações Climáticas e o Papel das Ilhas (Climate Change and the Role of Islands) proposes ways of raising relevant questions and making visible the friction between technical knowledge and territorial knowledge. Between art, science, politics, and memory, a relational field is built towards gesture rather than consensus.
The islands present themselves as forms of life marked by physical limits but amplified by practices of care, adaptation, and resistance. From Mayotte to the Azores, from Haiti to Madeira, passing through Madagascar, the Canary Islands, or Cape Verde, stories emerge that reject collapse as the only narrative. In these places, we find an intimacy with the rhythm of the earth, with the silences of the water, with the long time of the plants.
This festival is defined as a space of friction and openness. The art that circulates here does not lend itself to a decorative function or to illustrating causes. It takes the form of excavation and research. Between performative practices, residences, conversations, culinary experiences, and ephemeral archives, a constellation of gestures is drawn – some public, others silent – that reveal the texture of relationships and the complexity of territories.
The program is spread over places with a strong symbolic charge – Roça Água-Izé, Roça São João dos Angolares, Praça da Independência and Casa das Artes, Criação, Ambiente, Utopias (CACAU). In these spaces, thinking about the climate crisis also involves re-evaluating how discourse about the future is produced: who speaks, who is listened to, and what vocabulary is mobilized. The panels dedicated to the role of media and young people underline the importance of opening up the field to a multiplicity of voices and the intergenerational imagination.
We are counting on Ailton Krenak. Their presence introduces another temporality – one that proposes postponing the end as a conscious exercise of interruption. His intervention invites us to listen to the world beyond technical language, through an ethic of shared responsibility.
The festival takes place in the context of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of São Tomé and Príncipe's independence. This milestone does not serve as a celebratory plot but as a starting point for thinking about new forms of internationalism between islands. An archipelago of practices and knowledge in dialog, where what matters is the relationship between fragments and not the construction of a total narrative.
During the days of the festival, conferences, talks, and listenings will be recorded to generate a collective document. A gesture of critical and sensitive editing that can act as a tool for reflection and future guidance. More than a report, this document could become a living body of questions, ideas, and possibilities.
Between July 5 and 12, 2025, in São Tomé and Príncipe, a time for listening, thinking, and relating is proposed. Thinking from the islands implies slowing down, recognizing creation as situated practice, and accepting uncertainty as a matter of the future. Art, in this context, doesn't offer immediate solutions but opens up cracks – ways of paying attention, resisting, and reconfiguring the sensible.
Perhaps this is precisely how the end of the world is postponed – and regenerated.
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