Anozero Festival Picks Anarchism to Fight Hotel Development
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- Anozero director Carlos Antunes is threatening to cancel the Coimbra biennale if the Portuguese government proceeds with plans to convert its 17th-century Santa Clara-a-Nova convent venue into a private hotel under the state's Revive programme
- The festival's 2025 edition, titled Segurar, dar, receber ("To hold, to give, to receive"), frames anarchism around Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin's mutual-aid philosophy rather than political disorder
- Anozero operates on a budget of €800,000 per edition and fills 9,650 square metres of the former convent, which served as Portuguese army barracks from 1891 until the festival moved in in 2015
- Coimbra is home to more than 20 leftwing and anarchist student fraternities known as repúblicas — self-managed communal housing projects with names like Republic of Ghosts and Palace of Madness — yet these existing mutual-aid communities are largely absent from the festival's curated display
- For the opening, Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo led 260 singers in white from Coimbra's central square to the convent, performing a chorus from Verdi's Nabucco
- Anozero is partnering with Manifesta, the nomadic European biennale, for its 2028 edition — a move that could either secure the festival's future or replicate the same displacement pattern it now protests
Why it matters: The Revive programme's hotel conversion of Santa Clara-a-Nova would end a decade of cultural use at a 9,650-square-metre site that has hosted art from Taryn Simon and others; the festival's anarchist theme doubles as a curatorial argument that collective stewardship beats private redevelopment, a lesson the article underscores by noting that Coimbra's *repúblicas* have already used exactly that tactic to buy out a threatening landlord.
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