Imaginarius

Imaginarius is an international festival of performing arts in public space, shaped by and embedded in Santa Maria da Feira. Each edition unfolds across streets, squares and everyday urban environments, inviting artistic creation to engage directly with the rhythms, tensions and possibilities of the territory, and with the communities who inhabit it.The 2026 edition marks twenty-five years of Imaginarius. This celebration is not approached as a retrospective moment, but as an opportunity to acknowledge a shared path while opening space for new directions. Celebrating the past becomes inseparable from imagining what comes next. The festival embraces this threshold as a conscious act, recognising that continuity is shaped by choices, and that the future of artistic creation in public space is something to be actively constructed, here and now.Public space remains at the core of Imaginarius. Not as a neutral backdrop, but as a living and contested territory, shaped by social dynamics, collective memory and everyday use. The city is both context and collaborator, a place where artistic gestures meet real conditions, frictions and encounters. Across its programme, the festival brings together diverse artistic languages, scales and formats, from large-scale interventions to intimate encounters, always grounded in a close relationship with place. Imaginarius values creation as a situated practice, attentive to its surroundings and open to dialogue, where artistic risk and accessibility coexist, and where audiences are invited not only to watch, but to inhabit, stay and reflect.As Imaginarius enters its next chapter, the festival reaffirms its role as a meeting point for artists, audiences and professionals from different geographies, fostering exchange, experimentation and shared responsibility towards public space and the ways we live together.