[Unfortunately due to international travel issues, Odete is unable to appear at this year’s Fabric Festival at AS220. Refunds have been issued to all ticket-holders and may take several days to appear.]

Odete works between performance, text, visual arts and music. Her work is obsessed with historiographical writing, using erotics and paranoia as two somatic ways of relating to the archival materials. She writes through her body, speculating biographies of historical characters through epidermic pleasures: fashion, personality, presence, fragrance, grace, sensibility. Lately she has been researching and working around building connection points between “effeminate” histories, from the baroque Castrati to the 19th century dandies.

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Fabric Arts Festival is a celebration of art, music, community, and the city of Fall River, Massachusetts. It aims to be a platform for artistic creation through a multidisciplinary program that seeks to create a cultural and communal experience. Fabric understands the city of Fall River as a territory of arrivals and intersections where different geographies converge, creating a space of diversity and opportunity for an evolving dialogue. It seeks to showcase the city and the region as it has always been: a place of creation and production – a city of makers in the expanded fields of art and design.

The Festival aims to show, map and build on the narratives of the city - its spaces and traditions - in order to celebrate its communities and diversity. Each edition focuses on new dynamics that morph into artistic projects, exploring visual arts, music, performance and commensality, produced in the region, in relation to Portugal and its diasporas and attuned to global conversations and relationships. Fabric’s first edition took place in 2019, and its second in two moments between 2020 and 2021, reconfigured in the physical and online spheres by the limitations of the pandemic. The third edition occurred in May 2022, assuming the Festival as a generator of meeting spaces throughout the city. In 2023, Fabric returned to its Fall schedule and proposed a regional program that moved between Fall River, New Bedford, and Providence.

Organized by Casa dos Açores in New England, the project is mentored and directed by Portuguese-American entrepreneur Michael Benevides, with artistic direction by Jesse James, and curated and organized by and with multiple entities and partners.