From October 20th to November 4th the 7th edition of the Maputo Fast Forward Festival (MFF) will take place in different cultural spaces in Maputo.

It features an international conference in a hybrid format, multidisciplinary exhibitions, concerts and workshops to allow interaction between artists with different experiences and knowledge.

The conference will take place on October 25th and 26th at the Fernando Leite Couto Foundation and will be broadcast online. It will address the multiple forms of dissidence and activism that have proliferated on the African continent against the growing authoritarianism (digital or otherwise), with specialists with extensive experience on the subject coming from Mozambique, South Africa, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Lebanon.

The diversity of origins of the various participants serves, finally, to underline that these problems now have a global dimension and that only by establishing transnational solidarity networks will it be possible to fight the challenges faced on a planetary scale with resilience and imagination.

This edition is special because this year the creator and artistic director of the festival, Rui Trindade, passed away in July, and so it will be dedicated to him.

MFF-2022 will be around the theme Free Radicals - Dissidence and Activism. The expression "free radicals" is a metaphor for the need to think and act in different and radical ways in relation to the multiple and converging crises that the world is facing.

A free radical can be defined as any molecular species capable of independent existence that contains an unpaired electron in an atomic orbital. The presence of an unpaired electron results in certain common properties that are shared by most radicals.

Many radicals are unstable and highly reactive. The MFF 2022 edition is an initiative of 16NetO, and is sponsored by the Swiss Embassy in Mozambique, the European Union in Mozambique, the Spanish Embassy in Mozambique, and Camões - Portuguese Cultural Center in Maputo.