The biennial festival Maputo Fast Forward is a space for collective growth — a meeting point for creators, thinkers, technologists, students, families, and the curious. Over several days, the city becomes a living laboratory of ideas and experiences, featuring international conferences, exhibition openings, networking moments, and a vibrant cultural programme including exhibitions, concerts, performances, masterclasses, and much more.
Among the activities are also the knowledge circles — open spaces for dialogue and listening, fostering the sharing of experiences between experts and curious minds, professionals and learners. Horizontal moments of exchange where knowledge circulates, is questioned, and collectively built.
The 2026 edition is especially symbolic as we celebrate 10 years of the festival — a decade of fostering art, digital culture, and innovation in Mozambique and beyond. Over the years, Maputo Fast Forward has established itself as a platform for experimentation, critical thinking, and collaboration, opening space for new narratives and new ways of imagining the future.
The biennial also presents the results of the Academy — artistic residencies and research projects developed throughout the cycle — alongside a bazaar of innovative projects, multidisciplinary performances, and experimental spaces designed for all audiences. It is a family-friendly festival, open and free to the public, promoting access, participation, and discovery.
In 2026, under the theme Artificial Realities, the festival invites us to reflect on the time we live in: a time when reality is no longer simply a place — it has become interface, flow, projection. Between screens, algorithms, and remixed memories, we inhabit a territory where the real and the imagined coexist without fixed boundaries. We no longer only consume images — we produce them, negotiate them, inhabit them.
Without revealing everything, this edition proposes a journey through constructed worlds, hybrid narratives, and speculative futures — a space where technology is not merely a tool, but language, material, and question. Artificial Realities promises immersive experiences, unexpected encounters, and urgent dialogues about the role of creation in an age of constant simulations.
If we are already living inside a simulation, what world do we want to project next?
Save the date: late October 2026, in Maputo.
Celebrating 10 years of imagining the future.
More information will be announced soon.
