Ahead of the September 19 TEDxHorta gathering at Teatro Faialense, organizer Mário Costa speaks about creating a space for reflection, questioning and new ideas on Faial. Its ambition is both simple and audacious: instead of accepting that island geography places the world beyond reach, “we can bring the world here.”
An island teaches us very early to measure distance. There is the sea between one shore and another, the flight that must be taken, the opportunities that sometimes appear to exist more easily elsewhere. But Mário Costa believes geography need not determine the limits of intellectual life. As one of the organizers of TEDxHorta, he is trying to reverse the traditional direction of that equation. The Azores do not always have to travel outward in search of ideas, people and possibilities. Sometimes, as he tells Diário dos Açores, “we can bring the world here.”
The project emerged from Costa and Daniela’s experience attending TED events and their conviction that the Azores had room for a similar space devoted to reflection and questioning. After exploring the idea and recognizing its potential, they submitted an application and obtained the necessary TEDx license. Organizing such an event on Faial, however, brings the particular challenges of an ultraperipheral island: speakers must often travel considerable distances for an event whose stage appearance may last only minutes; similar events are not close enough to share resources easily; and promotion must reach a community that may not yet fully understand the TEDx format. Yet those same difficulties reinforce the purpose of the project. If insularity creates distance, TEDxHorta seeks to make ideas travel across it.
This year’s theme is “Âncoras”—“Anchors.” Costa describes contemporary life as increasingly polarized, a world in which it is easy to lose sight of the values, people and ideas that orient us. But anchors can have another meaning: what stabilizes us can also prevent movement. The theme therefore invites speakers and audiences to consider what keeps them grounded, what holds them back, and what may need to be released in order to move forward. It is particularly evocative on an island whose history has always been shaped by departures, arrivals, harbors and the uncertain balance between remaining and leaving.
TEDxHorta does not seek a single kind of speaker. According to Costa, what matters is a powerful idea worth sharing. The organizers deliberately look across different fields—literature, science, health, sport and education among them—because the richness of a TEDx event comes from placing perspectives beside one another that might rarely meet elsewhere. The speaker is not simply invited to lecture. Each intervention is prepared over months, refined and transformed so that a complex idea can become accessible, memorable and meaningful within the concentrated time of a TEDx talk. “It is not an event where we sit in an auditorium and relax,” Costa explains. It is intended to make the audience think, question and even feel provoked.
The organizers also hope that the event will reach beyond those seated inside Teatro Faialense. Young people, schools, companies and institutions are among the audiences Costa particularly wants to engage, because an idea heard in a few minutes can sometimes open an unexpected direction. TEDxHorta also seeks to give visibility to talent and projects originating in the Azores, placing local ideas in contact with people and possibilities beyond the archipelago. The relationship works in both directions: bring outside perspectives to the islands, while allowing Azorean knowledge and creativity to travel outward.
There is already a desire for continuity. After two TEDxHorta events and a TEDxHorta Play gathering, the organizers want the project to continue, although Costa acknowledges the considerable work and financial demands involved. Local partnerships and sponsorships have been essential, while much of the organizational labor is voluntary. There is also a larger aspiration: that similar initiatives might eventually emerge on other Azorean islands, accumulating experience and perhaps creating a network capable of helping new organizers develop comparable spaces for ideas.
In that ambition, TEDxHorta becomes about something larger than a conference. For centuries, islanders have lived with the assumption that important centers of culture, knowledge and opportunity exist somewhere beyond the horizon. The history of the Azores is filled with people who crossed the ocean because the world they sought seemed to be elsewhere.
Mário Costa proposes another possibility. The horizon can still invite us outward. But it need not condemn us to the margins. Sometimes the world can be persuaded to cross the sea in the opposite direction. Sometimes we can bring it here.
Based on an interview by journalist Vasco Blayer for Diário dos Açores, Paulo Viveiros, director. The Photo is also from DA.