José Oliveira Pinto was born in Vila Real, Portugal (1988). Son of a portuguese father and a mother born in Angola, he grew up amid different experiences of belonging, which has shaped his relationship with language, memory and listening. He lives between Portugal and Cape Verde, where he develops artistic, community and research projects. His practice brings together writing, voice and performance as ways of constructing presence, symbolic resistance and community belonging. He holds a degree in Psychology (University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro) and a master’s in Clinical and Health Psychology (University of Beira Interior). He also holds a master’s in Culture and Communication (University of Lisbon), a field in which he deepened his research on poetry as a form of communication, the politics of hope in poetry festivals and social innovation in management of cultural and artistic organizations.
He is a founder of CALHAU, a collective of emerging artists and poets in Vila Real (2015). He is also a founder and cultural manager of Associação txon-poesia (Cape Verde), where he has been involved in community work since 2017. He is the editor of txon, poetry and poetics magazine dedicated to sharing between afro-luso-brazilian voices, artistic director of Spoken Word Mindelo and of Grupo Polipoético do Mindelo, programmer of the International Poetry and Poetics Festival in Mindelo and facilitator of workshops in writing, theatre, performance and spoken word. He develops his research at the intersection of psychology, cultural studies and performance studies, focusing on poetic language as a technology of resistance, collective memory and agency. He has published essays and scientific articles on literary practices and community belonging and on the cognitive-emotional power of mediatized slam poetry.
José Oliveira Pinto 