The ideas shaping this year’s TEDxMarvila

Set in the heart of Marvila, one of Lisbon’s most creatively charged districts, the event brings together an eclectic mix of speakers, artists and performers for a day that moves well beyond the traditional conference format. Alongside talks, the programme weaves in art, music and film - creating something closer to a cultural gathering than a series of presentations.

At its centre sits a deceptively simple theme: What is Love?

Not treated as a cliché or a soft idea, but as something worth interrogating properly across disciplines, perspectives and lived experience.

Tickets are available via the TEDxMarvila website.

To explore that tension, we spoke to a selection of this year’s speakers - each offering a distinct perspective on a question that resists easy answers.

Love as a choice, not an emotion

For Susana Coerver, the starting point is a refusal to take the question at face value.

“I didn’t say yes to speaking. I said yes to the question.”

It’s a subtle shift but it reframes everything because what she’s interrogating isn’t love as a feeling, but love as something far more deliberate.

“We talk about love all the time… But we almost never stop to examine what it really means.”

Her answer cuts through the usual narrative.

“Love is not what we feel at our best, but what we choose at our hardest.”

It’s not soft. It’s not passive. It’s a decision and one that shows up in moments that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, or unseen.

Love is a way of existing that we grow into.

For Sholeh Wolpé, love is not something to hold onto. It’s something much more transformative.

“We are living through a time where the absence of love is visible everywhere - in war, in division, in the way we ‘other’ one another.”

Her perspective draws on Sufi philosophy, but lands with urgency now.

“Love is not something we claim. It is something that transforms us.”

A shift away from self-interest and toward something more expansive.

Love is an energy you transmit - whether you realise it or not

For Valérie Corsias, love isn’t something to define. It’s something already in motion.

“Love is an energy we transmit… through presence, emotion, and color.”

Her work explores colour as emotion, but the idea extends further: that we are constantly communicating something, even in silence.

Love, in this sense, is not a statement. It’s a signal.

Not what we say but what people feel in our presence.

A theme that refuses to stay simple

There’s no single answer emerging from this year’s programme and that’s precisely the point.

Love appears here as:

• a decision
• a force of transformation
• an energy in motion

Different interpretations, all pushing against the idea that love is easy, obvious, or already understood.

And that tension is what gives this year’s TEDxMarvila its edge.

Not because it defines love but because it refuses to simplify it.

To experience these ideas in full, TEDxMarvila takes place on May 24 in Lisbon.
Tickets are available now via the official tedxmarvila.com