The seventh anniversary of Mar&Ilha will open the Whaleboat Summit 2026 at the Museu dos Baleeiros in Lajes do Pico, bringing together a new music video, live performance and a tribute to the men—and women—whose lives were shaped by whaling.

On Pico, the history of whaling does not belong only to museums. It survives in boats and photographs, in family stories, in the vocabulary of the sea and, increasingly, in contemporary artistic creation. On Sunday, October 4, at 8:30 p.m., that relationship between inheritance and creation will take center stage at the Museu dos Baleeiros in Lajes do Pico, where the seventh anniversary of the musical project Mar&Ilha will also mark the opening of the Whaleboat Summit 2026.

The evening begins with the public premiere of the music video “Amor Ausente,” directed by Diogo Rola and produced by Mar&Ilha and Whaleboat Tales. Rather than functioning simply as a screening, the new audiovisual work will become the starting point for a conversation with invited guests, allowing music and image to open a broader reflection on memory, island identity and the maritime world.

Music will then take over the auditorium. Mar&Ilha and guests will revisit songs from the project’s first album while presenting material from its second, alongside several pieces chosen especially as a tribute to Pico’s whalers. Significantly, that homage is dedicated not only to “those of the sea” but also to “the women of the land”—a recognition that whaling history was lived both aboard the boats and in the homes and communities that waited on shore.

That dialogue makes the setting particularly meaningful. The Museu dos Baleeiros preserves the material memory of an industry that profoundly marked Pico, while Mar&Ilha approaches that inheritance through the language of the present. The result is not an attempt to recreate the past, but to allow contemporary music and audiovisual art to converse with it.

Its inclusion in the opening of the Whaleboat Summit 2026 reinforces the same idea: maritime heritage remains alive when it can be studied, preserved, discussed and reimagined by new generations. With the support of the Municipality of Lajes do Pico, the anniversary celebration becomes more than a musical event—it becomes another way of keeping an island’s relationship with the ocean in motion.

Admission to the October 4 event is free, subject to the capacity of the Museu dos Baleeiros auditorium.

On Pico, the whaleboats no longer leave shore for the reasons they once did. But their stories continue to travel—sometimes through memory, sometimes through museums, and sometimes, as on this October evening, through a song.

Based on a Press release from Museu do Pico–Poster from Museu do Pico.