Fifteen years after its launch in the mountain city of Covilhã, WOOL continues to occupy a distinctive position within Portugal’s cultural landscape. Established in 2011 as the country’s first urban art festival, the project has developed a long-term approach to public art grounded in local identity, community participation and contextual artistic practice. Rooted in a city shaped by centuries of wool production and industrial heritage, WOOL has consistently treated its hometown not as a backdrop for artistic intervention, but as its starting point.
Taking place from 11 to 21 June 2026, the anniversary edition arrives at a moment of reflection. Over the past fifteen years, WOOL has evolved from a local cultural experiment into one of Portugal’s most enduring urban art projects, building a permanent collection of artworks across the city while remaining committed to the principles that shaped its beginnings. From its inception, the festival has sought to use contemporary artistic practices as tools for cultural, social and territorial transformation, encouraging residents to rediscover the value of their own heritage while inviting artists to engage with the stories embedded in the city and its surrounding area.
This commitment to context distinguishes WOOL from many urban art festivals centred primarily on visibility or spectacle. The project emerged with the ambition of paying homage to the territory and strengthening the relationship between local communities and the places they inhabit. Over the years, artists have been encouraged to explore the city’s history, architecture, natural landscape, heritage, and collective memory before developing their interventions. As a result, many of the artworks produced through the festival are inseparable from the specific environment in which they were created.
The importance of community participation has remained equally central. WOOL has consistently expanded beyond mural production, incorporating concerts, educational programmes, workshops, guided tours, exhibitions and collaborative art projects developed alongside schools, associations and residents. In this framework, urban art becomes not only a visual experience but also a process of dialogue and collective construction.
WOOL 2026: Context, Memory, and Collective Participation
The 2026 programme offers a clear illustration of the principles that have guided WOOL since its foundation. Rather than imposing artworks onto the city, the invited artists were encouraged to engage with Covilhã’s landscapes, histories, institutions and everyday life, developing interventions that emerged from observation, research and dialogue.
Among the invited artists, Tellas perhaps embodies this approach most clearly. One of the pioneers of the Italian street art scene, the Sardinian artist is known for translating elements of local ecosystems into large-scale painted compositions. For his intervention in Covilhã, he spent time exploring the Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain range in mainland Portugal, photographing flowers and plants that later became the basis of a freehand mural. Painted without a preliminary sketch and rendered in a single blue tone reminiscent of cyanotype, the work resembles a contemporary herbarium, transforming direct observation of the surrounding landscape into a delicate visual archive.
There’s no finished sketch waiting to be painted. I start from the photos I took in the mountains a few days ago and build the composition directly on the wall, changing things as I go. I add things, remove things, move things around. In a way, the wall becomes my journal, and I’m excited to discover what it will become.
– Tellas
A different relationship with place can be found in the work of South African artist Ben Johnston. Known internationally for his large-scale typographic murals, Johnston brought his distinctive lettering practice to Covilhã through the phrase “Novo Dia” (“New Day”), taken from a fado by Amália Rodrigues dedicated to the city. Installed in a neighbourhood that had never before hosted a WOOL intervention, the work marks a symbolic expansion of the festival beyond its traditional geography. Surrounded by schools and everyday pedestrian activity, the phrase acquires additional layers of meaning, connecting local cultural memory with ideas of renewal, education and future generations.
Questions of language and identity lie at the centre of Mariana A Miserável‘s contribution. The Portuguese artist developed a series of tile-based interventions installed across the historic centre featuring expressions drawn from the local dialect and accompanied by illustrations in her characteristic visual language. Unlike the monumental scale of many murals in the city, her pieces operate on an intimate scale, inviting discovery through daily encounters.
This project is a series of small tile panels spread around Covilhã, all based on local expressions. I had to ask the team to explain the meaning of each one because I’m from Porto and the dialect is completely different. It’s funny how different dialects can be when Portugal is such a small country.
– Mariana A Miserável
Memory also plays a central role in the work of Projeto Ruído. Returning to WOOL after the disappearance of their previous mural in the city, the Portuguese duo created a new intervention dedicated to the centenary of Orfeão da Covilhã, one of the city’s most important cultural institutions. Drawing from archival photographs and historical references, the mural connects local cultural memory with the artists’ visual vocabulary of geometry, abstraction and figurative elements, transforming a commemorative project into a reflection on continuity and collective identity.
Other artists approached the territory through its social and political dimensions. Israeli artist and activist Addam Yekutieli, better known as Know Hope, presented two installations exploring colonialism, distance and perception. Observed through telescopes positioned at a distance from the works themselves, the interventions transform the act of looking into a metaphor for the way societies interpret complex histories and ongoing conflicts. In dialogue with Portugal’s colonial past and contemporary realities linked to the occupation of Palestine, the works invite viewers to consider how distance shapes understanding.
These installations are about deflection, the abstraction of history, and the position of the person reading them: who is reading, from where, and how sometimes the answer requires a certain distance before we can really see these things.
-Know Hope
Meanwhile, Catalan artist Octavi Serra turned his attention towards another layer of the city’s history. Occupying abandoned shops, broken windows and former industrial buildings, his interventions use irony and visual disruption to draw attention to spaces often overlooked in everyday life. In a city historically shaped by the wool industry and still marked by the traces of economic transformation, these works encourage a renewed reading of the urban landscape and the stories embedded within it.
The Canadian duo Nasarimba completed their mural before the official opening of the festival, effectively serving as an introduction to many of the themes explored throughout the programme. Developed through close observation of the local environment, the work incorporates architectural details, textures and visual references familiar to residents, demonstrating how contemporary urban art can emerge from attentive engagement with place rather than from the repetition of a pre-existing formula.
Seen together, the 2026 interventions suggest that WOOL’s strength lies less in a single visual language than in a shared method. Each artist approaches Covilhã differently, through plants, typography, dialect, archives, abandoned spaces or political memory, yet the works are connected by the same insistence on reading the city before adding to it.
Beyond the artistic interventions, community participation remained at the heart of the anniversary edition. The most ambitious example was A Nossa Casa (“Our House”), a large-scale collective project developed over several weeks with local residents, who came together to crochet, stitch and assemble thousands of handmade textile elements that were later used to transform a house in Covilhã’s historic centre into a public artwork. The project drew upon the manual knowledge, social bonds and textile traditions that have shaped the city for generations, turning individual contributions into a collective expression of care, belonging and shared authorship.
Another significant participatory initiative was Marcha pela Esperança (March for Hope), coordinated by artist Mantraste. Through workshops involving local schools, children and young people were invited to reflect on their fears, concerns and hopes for the future, translating these thoughts into hundreds of handmade placards. The resulting public march transformed personal reflections into a collective civic gesture, bringing young voices into the centre of public space and reinforcing the festival’s belief that cultural participation begins with listening.
Participation also unfolded through a series of smaller but equally meaningful encounters. Mini-concerts held beside murals in progress invited audiences to experience artworks while they were still taking shape, creating informal spaces where music, conversation and artistic production could coexist. Public debates addressed questions of cultural access, citizenship and participation, while screenings and guided tours expanded opportunities for dialogue between artists, residents and visitors.
Together, these projects demonstrate that WOOL keeps creating situations in which artworks, conversations, shared experiences and local knowledge become part of the same cultural process. In this sense, the anniversary programme reflects the broader trajectory of the festival itself: a long-term commitment to building relationships between people and place through contemporary artistic practice.