Writer and curator Filipa da Rocha Nunes explores the intersections between writing, curating, visual research, and poetry. Starting from a central question — does she write to curate, or does she curate as an excuse to write? — the lecture approaches language not only as a way to communicate, but as a material for artistic and curatorial experimentation.

Moving between words, images, maps, and memories, Nunes shares methods that shape her practice: repetition, poems created through Google Maps and meant to be walked, and an understanding of land as something that holds and carries memory. Through these processes, research becomes a poetic gesture, allowing stories, territories, and possible futures to be rearranged through language. Rather than separating disciplines, the lecture looks at what happens when they overlap: curating becomes a form of writing, writing becomes a method of research, and language becomes a space for information, imagination, and subtle spells to coexist.


Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies · Brown University · Providence
Meiklejohn House, 159 George Street, Providence, RI 02912

Between factory shifts and weekend dances, a little-known world of pop, rock and disco took shape within New England’s bustling Portuguese and Azorean communities. A BEAT OF SAUDADE revisits some of the musicians and audiences who brought that scene to life in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on Henrique Ferreira’s research, Azorean director Diogo Lima brings their records and memories into the present, moving between New England and the Azores. Dreams of stardom meet everyday pleasures, compromises and lingering doubts: after building a life across the ocean, where do you belong?

Commissioned by FABRIC and developed between 2024 and 2026, the film culminates a three-year project exploring music, migration, and memory.

FREE
Limited seating · First come, first served

Azorean pianist, composer, and songwriter Filipe Furtado closes FABRIC’s opening night with a performance by his trio, a group that uses song as a starting point to explore improvisation, jazz influences, and contemporary sound practices.

Rooted in Coimbra, the trio serves as a space for collective creation, where compositions emerge through dialogue between piano, saxophone, and drums and are further expanded in live performance through electronics and vocals. The project is based on Furtado’s original repertoire — shaped by his trajectory as an Azorean musician and composer living in Coimbra since 2010 — and developed in collaboration with Paulo Silva (drums) and Filipe Fidalgo (saxophone).

In 2025, the trio released the album Como Se Matam Primaveras, marking a key moment in their ongoing exploration of form, improvisation, and contemporary song.

Limited seating · First come, first served

Free . Register here

Taking place inside the exhibition Cloth of the Earth: Indigo, Cape Verde, and West African Knowledge, this gallery conversation brings Kate Irvin, RISD Museum Curator of Costume and Textiles, together with artists Linsey Wallace and Brittni Ann Harvey.

Moving through the exhibition and the artists’ own practices, the conversation explores indigo and its histories and metaphysical associations, alongside natural dyeing techniques and fibers. Together, they consider how materials can carry knowledge across places and generations, and how these histories continue to inform contemporary artistic practice.


Cloth of the Earth Indigo, Cape Verde, and West African Knowledge
August 1, 2026 – March 28, 2027

Deep blue and rich with meaning, indigo is more than a color. Across cultures and generations, this natural dye has signaled protection, healing, identity, and extraordinary skill. Cloth of the Earth: Indigo, Cape Verde, and West African Knowledge brings together indigo-dyed textiles and clothing from the RISD Museum’s collection alongside contemporary West African indigo-dyed works on loan from local community member Maria Tavares, a native of the Cape Verde Islands.

At the heart of the exhibition is a Cape Verdean panu di terra (“cloth of the earth”), a complex handwoven textile that embodies stories of cultural memory, resistance, and renewal. Seen in dialogue with other works on view, this cloth reveals indigo as knowledge passed down through technical skill, cosmological belief, and enduring histories of resilience and continuity.

Following Comida Casera, the collective workshop presented earlier at FABRIC, Evelyn Rydz returns to Fall River with a new iteration of the project that moves from the communal table into the aisles of Portugalia Marketplace.

Developed from recipes and stories gathered through conversations at Comida Casera gatherings, Across Aisles: Recetas de Casa takes the form of a series of recipe-stories distributed throughout the supermarket. Imagined as a collective archive, each card brings together ingredients and instructions across generations and geographies to approach a recipe as more than a practical guide: it can also carry a story, a relationship, or a way of remembering home.

Visitors are invited to move through the aisles, discover and collect the cards among the products and ingredients that surround them. Taken away from the supermarket, the cards can enter other kitchens and homes, where the recipes can be cooked, shared, adapted, and given new meanings.


Comida Casera, by Evelyn Rydz
Since 2016, Comida Casera has brought together participants for multigenerational gatherings grounded in active listening and open exchange as a means of cultivating community across divides. Together, participants explore the ways migration, familial traditions, and environmental change shape our relationships to food, place, and belonging.

FR MoCA brings together Indi Nunez and Nelson Vaz Pires, alongside A Maior, a cultural program based in Viseu, Portugal. The presentation is conceived as an active and communal space where photography operates both as an artistic practice and as a shared tool - contributing to a superimposed facade and community portraits, integrated throughout the gallery space with design elements.

Throughout the evening, Nunez will photograph members of the public amongst existing installations that call on a range of emotions. A communal moment centered around cachupa, a Cape Verdean dish with many variations across families and communities, brings food into the exhibition as another form of gathering and exchange.

Food will be shared with the audience while quantities last.

Come dressed in red. Bring words with you.

This is a collective dinner-performance unfolding through three acts of food, readings, ritual, and shared gestures. Guests are invited to wear red and to bring words, poems, proverbs, songs, or other texts that speak to ideas of freedom and abolition. These contributions become part of an evening made collectively by those around the table.

Conceived by Filipa da Rocha Nunes and Claudio Bueno, in collaboration with the artists J. Simões and Dandha da Hora, this dinner brings Passagem (2024), by the collective Explode! Platform, into the setting of a dinner, where distinct practices and traditions meet through a sequence of shared actions. Food and drinks, conceived with Frankie Mundo, become part of the experience and its rhythm.

This red dinner is approached not as a single symbol with a fixed meaning, but as a thread connecting different histories, bodies, and gestures. Across spirituality, celebration, and resistance, the evening asks what can happen when these associations are placed together and experienced collectively.

Limited to 75 guests. Tickets will be available SEP 23RD.

Dance Poem Revolution is an interactive installation in which participants generate poetry through movement using a custom-built system inspired by Dance Dance Revolution. Players’ steps activate language drawn from revolutionary texts, songs, and local histories, producing new writing in real time.

For each installation, Hoff works with local collaborators to gather source material specific to the people and place, allowing the work to evolve with its context. The project explores how political thought and history can become embodied, poetic, joyful, and communal storytelling. Across installations and performances, it becomes a living archive shaped by movement—one in which revolution is understood not as a fixed narrative, but as a situated, collective process that is felt, practiced, and rewritten together.

Following Dance Poem Revolution, Levi takes the night from words into sound and collective movement, closing Saturday with a DJ set made to dance. Lévi Gabriel is a multidisciplinary artist working across music, writing, theatre, performance, and visual arts, often bringing historical research into dialogue with contemporary culture. Behind the decks, Levi moves freely between hyperpop, techno, vocals, and unexpected references; their sets are fast, theatrical, and dance-floor driven.

FABRIC closes with SUNDAY SOCIAL, an evening gathering at Luzo Auto Body where food, art, wine, stories, and music come together — gradually moving from listening into a full-on dance party.

Throughout the evening, chef and culinary artist Grace Goodrich of Providence-based project Good Rich Food serves a churrasco-style grazing table— inspired by her Northern heritage and recent travels in the Algarve region. An installation by Mia Pinheiro and Michael Medeiros draws from the history of Luzo, New Bedford, and the region’s relationship with cod fishing, while another tradition continues as The Pinheiros and friends press wine at the garage.

At 5:30 PM, artist, tailor, and DJ Claudia de Sousa-Baptista presents Resistance Music Across the Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora (working title), a lecture-performance emerging from her ongoing research into music across Portuguese-speaking communities. Moving between storytelling, listening, and sound, she traces music as a carrier of memory and a tool for resistance, cultural exchange, and collective expression.

Around 6:30 PM, listening gives way to dancing. Claudia takes over the music and the garage becomes a dance floor.
Come hungry and bring your dancing shoes!