WHERE WE MEET

Fabric presents artists working in music, performance, and visual arts. It seeks to promote collaboration between local cultural agents and Festival artists and aims to show, map, and build from the narratives of the city, its spaces, and traditions, to celebrate their communities and diversity.

The program is organized around three days - May 12, 13, and 14, 2022. The Festival navigates between three programming areas: Common Spaces, an exploration of visual arts and architecture; Dialogues, an experience of music and sounds; and A Table for many, centered on commensality and encounter.

The Festival takes place in the center (downtown) of Fall River. Centered around an axis of seminal sites of Portuguese culture (Portugalia Marketplace, Casa dos Açores da Nova Inglaterra, or CANI), the Festival perimeter expands to include key creative venues such as the Narrows Center for the Arts, P.A.L., Smokestack Studios, and the Quequechan River Rail Trail, an outdoor trail and urban nature conservation area.

The Festival is preceded by a period of artistic residencies and online work in which creative projects are developed and then presented and exhibited during the different periods of the Festival.

*In life and in Death, Amen!, is a space of pure and raw energy, ritualistic gestures, and spiritual beliefs, with new works by Márcio Matos and DJ Kolt (Blacksea Não Maya). Textile Paintings, video projections, and music create a telluric setting that invites for encounter, listening, and immersion.


Free admission, limited to space capacity.
The installation can also be visited Friday - 2-7 PM and Saturday - 10 AM-7 PM.

A Table for Many is Fabric’s temporary pop-up restaurant with performances and culinary creations by chefs and artists. Our first table is prepared by Mitchell Mauricio, a Portuguese-American chef, with an archipelagic playlist designed by PMDS.

Mitchell’s culinary style focuses heavily on tradition. A melding of traditions that the Azorean diaspora hold so close to their hearts; tradition that is proper cooking and classical technique; and the hardy traditions of our New England cold-water fisherman and short-summer farmers.

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Tickets available here
$50 (includes food and beverage)
Duration: 3 hours

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A Table for many #1 is brought to you by Ole & Obrigado & Portugalia

PMDS is an electronic act that incorporates ambient, experimental, and techno elements, formed by Pedro Sousa and Filipe Caetano from the Azores Islands. Pedro has classical piano training and Filipe has many miles as a DJ. Both share a (un)controllable passion for analog gear, synthesizers, and other gadgets that only similar freaks will recognize.

In addition to the presentation of their latest album “Caloura”, at Fabric PMDS will introduce sonic intermissions, focused on cultural and geographical audio references, that will make the listener travel in place and time, to the Island, to the sea, to the mist and other ambient references that are elemental references of the band.

Duration 1h.
Free admission, limited to space capacity.
Tickets need to be reserved here

For two days, the Fall River Arts and Culture Coalition (FRACC) and Fabric invites visitors into artists and makers spaces on self-guided tours across the City that celebrate arts, culture, and creativity. Fall River Open Studio allows everyone a chance to take a sneak peek inside the city’s most creative spaces. With 10 locations and more than 30 artists participating, there’s a huge range of arts and crafts to take in, from painting and photography to textile art, ceramics, light sculpture and more.

Download the map and driving directions directly to your phone.

• Narrows Center for the Arts | 16 Anawan Street, Fall River, MA 02721
• Smokestack Studios | 191 Anawan Street, Fall River, MA 02721 • Greater Fall River Art Association | 80 Belmont Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Little Miss Art | 19 Granite Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Viva Pop-up | 333 South Main Street, Fall River, 02720
• Craftyish | 9 N Main Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FRMoCA) | 502 Bedford Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery | 777 Elsbree Street, Fall River, MA 02720

A Table for many is Fabric’s temporary pop-up restaurant with performances and culinary creations by chefs and artists. This dinner has the format of a performance lecture where the artists invite the audience for a collective cooking session.

Semiotics of the Cod (2019) adopts the format of a cooking show that is hosted by the artists João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira. In a public event, participants are invited to discover and share one of the most traditional Portuguese dishes, Bacalhau à Brás, and under the premise of a meal that is prepared and cooked collectively, the artists discuss the main ingredient of several Portuguese dishes – the cod - to analyze and deconstruct the Portuguese imagery around this fish, addressing historical, political, economic and social issues, exploring conversations related to capitalism, sexuality, and gender.

Semiotics of the Cod was initially commissioned for LIAF 2019 / North Norwegian Art Centre. The artists took part in LIAF 2019’s artist-in-residence program for 3 months in Skrova where they developed the investigation they present in this work.

Tickets are available here:
$35 (includes food and beverage)
Duration: 2:30 hours

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A Table for many #2 is brought to you with the support of FLAD - Luso-American Foundation for Development, AIDIL wines & Liquors & Esporão & Portugalia

Norberto Lobo is one of the most cherished musicians to appear in Portugal over the last two decades. He is – primarily – a guitarist whose work has revealed an inexhaustible detail, sense of discovery, and creativity throughout several albums and countless live appearances. From albums like Pata Lenta or Muxama that already populate a collective imagination to a sense of risk that leads him to experiment with bands – as in the most recent Estrela – or collaborations such as Montanhas Azuis, with Bruno Pernadas and Marco Franco.


Tickets available here
Double bill with Ece Canli

For two days, the Fall River Arts and Culture Coalition (FRACC) and Fabric invites visitors into artists and makers spaces on self-guided tours across the City that celebrate arts, culture, and creativity. Fall River Open Studio allows everyone a chance to take a sneak peek inside the city’s most creative spaces. With 10 locations and more than 30 artists participating, there’s a huge range of arts and crafts to take in, from painting and photography to textile art, ceramics, light sculpture and more.

Download the map and driving directions directly to your phone.

• Narrows Center for the Arts | 16 Anawan Street, Fall River, MA 02721
• Smokestack Studios | 191 Anawan Street, Fall River, MA 02721
• Greater Fall River Art Association | 80 Belmont Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Little Miss Art | 19 Granite Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Viva Pop-up | 333 South Main Street, Fall River, 02720
• Craftyish | 9 N Main Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FRMoCA) | 502 Bedford Street, Fall River, MA 02720
• Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery | 777 Elsbree Street, Fall River, MA 02720

We also meet each other through dialogue and exchange. Fabric is organizing a workshop with community members, creatives and entrepreneurs to brainstorm the future of Fall River and how arts and culture, and the Festival, can be part of this transformative process.

At 2 PM, the different working groups will present their questions, suggestions, and ideas for future projects that can imagine new common and shared spaces. Doors are open to everyone that wants to listen, participate and contribute.


Free Admission

Common Spaces is an exploration of visual arts and architecture. For this edition, the festival commissioned three projects and art installations for the Quequechan River trail. Join us for a guided tour with the artists!

Sculpture Garden - Maria Ana Vasco Costa
Maria Ana Vasco Costa is a Portuguese artist who works with ceramics and is recognized for her work in contemporary tile. The artist presents a sculpture park installed in the Quequechan Rivel Rail Trail, near the Rodman St tunnel, which can evoke a small town and also function as small benches and tables for communal use.

Living Walls - Gregory Pennisten
Gregory Penniston, an artist living in Fall River, was commissioned to transform the tunnel under Interstate 195 on Rodman St. into a living art gallery, making it a prime space for art-making and collective expression. Under the direction of Penniston, the project invites artists from the New England art scene (from different generations and backgrounds) to create tunnel artwork that translates the community's multiple expressions, languages, and geographies. This continuous living wall can foster creativity, generate new perceptions and feelings of belonging to the whole area, and be a vibrant, lively, and safe place.

Falling River Table - Tyler Inman
A public seating installation made of eight curved sections of a picnic table, designed by Tyler Inman and produced in Smokestack Studios. The curved shape of each table allows them to combine into a one bending form that resembles the flow of a river. This project will sit on Pocasset Street just below the North Main St. intersection, directly over the now underground Quequechan river for which Fall River is named.

Art and music come together at Fabric’s communal Picnic at the Quequechan River Rail Trail, and everyone is invited to participate and contribute to the “Festa” (colloquial term for popular gatherings in Portuguese). Come with your friends and family, bring your favorite snacks or introduce us to your own specialties. Food trucks will also be available for food and beverages.

Príncipe Discos will steer the party with contemporary dance music coming from Lisbon and its suburbs, where they are based. In Fall River, the collective is represented by the amazing Nídia + DJ Lycox


Enter & Park at
Britland Park, Wordell Street, Fall River MA 02720

Shabazz Palaces is an American hip hop group from Seattle led by Ishmael Butler a.k.a. Palaceer Lazaro in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Tendai "Baba" Maraire. They are back with yet another classic of divine mathematics design, with dazzling Afrofuturist sutras to illuminate distant constellations with sacred abstractions.


Tickets available here
Duration: 1h15'

Following the concert, Providence based Symposium Records DJ’S Scott MX & Jacob Herschel will close the evening with a dance party.