The 2021 edition of the Novas Invasões Festival took place in an atmosphere of challenges, uncertainties, and expectations management. The first quarter of the year witnessed the deterioration of Covid-19-related public health, which led the government to enact new measures to mitigate the spread of the virus, as well as a new lockdown. As a result, due to difficulties in the circulation of artists internationally, there was no invited country.
Without an invited country, the Festival had to be reconfigured and adapted to the constantly changing sanitary rules. Faced with the impact of Covid-19, the 4th edition of the FNI assumed a posture of resistance, in the face of a variety of challenges.
It can be said that the first challenge was to resist the climate of uncertainty that affected the conditions for its realisation.
Given the impact of the pandemic on the local cultural fabric, the main objective this year was to involve as many cultural agents as possible. To this end, mediation work was undertaken, in a short period of time, in various aspects: support for creation, figuration, training, presentation, and volunteering.
The final challenge was related to the response from the public, after a long period of lockdown, and with significantly altered participation conditions, compared to the Festival's 'normal' model. The answer was enlightening, showing a natural drop in participation compared to the 2019 festival, but with practically all sessions sold out.
Despite the exceptional setting, it was an edition truly open to local participation, developing and demonstrating the vitality of the city of Torres Vedras and the potential of a festival model that involves the communities and asserts itself as a unique, unrepeatable event. The Festival worked as a platform where the city and its inhabitants live together and show their creativity and qualities, established over the years. It was, in this sense, the epilogue of a long process of transformation and cultural construction, characteristics that we think will be emphasised in future editions, in which the cultural and artistic work carried out daily in the municipality will be able to be further appreciated.
Artistically, the intention was to maintain the Festival's quality and international dimension, increasing in this edition the relationship with local structures and artists, the implantation area and the affinities with the city. The relationships between associations and between artists gave uniqueness and unique meaning to the work conducted. We are a Festival with an identity space that elevates the city, its people, and its artistic and cultural associations to a level of self-realisation that is simultaneously: formative, creative and mediating. The FNI carries a potential for relating to historical processes that do not seek to redeem the past, but rather confront their practises and memories through creativity and artistic innovation. It is a project of individuals and of the city, traversing times and embracing the issues of our time. Nomadism and mobility, ecology and environment, the connection to the earth, and the confrontation between traditions and contemporaneity, the tensions between the individual and the collective, those are themes and concepts that permeate and circulate permanently in each edition of the FNI.
