N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,

September 4, 2022

Cleaning up my bookmarks part II: Feminism & Pornography

Why studying porn is like taking a cold shower, by Eva Wiseman: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/may/07/studying-porn-is-like-taking-a-cold-shower-eva-wiseman?CMP=fb_gu The Battle Over What It Means to Be Female, by Chris Hedges: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-battle-over-what-it-means-to-be-female/ The Feminist Avant-Garde, Now More than Ever, by Thomas Micchelli: Mi sexualidad es una creación artística (Lucía Egaña Rojas) The Sex Industry’s Attack on Feminists, by Meghan Murphy: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-sex-industrys-attack-on-feminists/…

September 4, 2022September 4, 2022

Cleaning up my bookmarks part I: Portrait

August 28, 2022

One month at CELEUMA

I had my first proper vacation time in six years and for about one month I moved to CELEUMA, a house inherited from a dear friend that passed away in 2018, which I’ve recently turned into a creative residency. The house is located in the countryside, isolated but not without some neighbours and the sea…

July 16, 2022July 19, 2022

Neither Acacia, nor Ant: an essay

I’ve been writing this post for weeks. Adding, editing, proofreading and questioning the intention to publish it. Obviously, I write because I want to, but mostly because I feel the urge to express myself and words are always my place of solace. In my mouth, words taste raw; often too dramatic and erratically poetic. As…

June 29, 2022June 29, 2022

Reality Check

Photography is not about reality. The fact that, when using a camera, what we see on film or screen somehow resembles circumstances we may have witnessed, has been complicating the relationship between photography and reality for almost 200 years. Mimese can explain part of the confusion, but not all. When illustrating a scene with photo-realism…

June 22, 2022June 29, 2022

End of the academic year: is it over now?

I started writing this post a week before students did their final presentations. We had our final class of tutorials and I found myself going back to a place of real discomfort, once again questioning what the hell was I doing (being a teacher) and if it was worth pursuing. A week or two prior…

April 3, 2022April 4, 2022

We need to start naming names

I’ve got a ton of shit to do and a multitude of voices controlling my every thought, writing stories that will one day be told, but not now. The only match I can seam to operate today, between what’s going on between the public and the private sphere, is to write, once again, about war…

March 17, 2022March 18, 2022

Media and the war: a recipe for disaster

Everyday, I wake up, hear the news, see some photographic registers of the previous events in Ukraine, get nauseated, shed a few tears and then re-fuel the level of frustration. It’s masochism, but I can’t avoid it. My irritation regarding what photography has been doing in relation to this particular war has been escalating to…

March 3, 2022March 18, 2022

Photography and the Romanticization of War

While WWIII isn’t officially declared, we just go about our days, or we don’t. I’m writing in anger and frustration, sick to the guts, thinking the best way to deal with this is to write and, in doing so, prevent students from having to hear me talk about this non stop for the rest of…

February 28, 2022

The Unabomber Manifesto

The other day I discovered a very curious fact about this blog. WordPress sent a notification about an out-of-the-ordinary affluence to the site, and as I ventured into the statistics to see what people were downloading, there came the surprise: since 2020, The Unabomber Manifesto has been downloaded more than 10.000 times! Nothing remotely compares…

February 27, 2022

War has arrived

Speaking from Portugal, a poor country that happens to have a magnificente geographical location, this may sound dramatic and nonsense. After all, we’re all safe here. We have some wheat, potatoes, cows, sheep, milk and sunshine, ocean surfers and couch surfers, though definitely less crowd surfing than needed. Basically, nothing with global significance is happening…

February 21, 2022March 18, 2022

Ethics and photography: a debate always worth having

Last week José, an enthusiastic student, brought several photobooks to class. As he put the first one in front of me, I was immediately stroke by its grotesqueness. I was unfamiliar with the author’s work and asked to borrow it. Back at home with the book and struggling to find words to make sense of…

February 14, 2022

CELEUMA – creative residency

Just dropping a few personal notes on CELEUMA, a residency program we’ve just created. Details can be found at our website (in portuguese only, for this first open call). So CELEUMA is set i n a family home, a place with loads of emotional baggage, which needed to be digested and regurgitated before a plan…

January 23, 2022January 24, 2022

Failing, while caring for others

Let me start by saying that all I really want to put out there with this post is that I came to a conclusion that probably most have arrived by now, meaning that, in the experience of love – and while caring for those we love – all that is guaranteed is that we’ll fail.…

December 11, 2021December 11, 2021

“I’d rather keep silent”

Events contaminated by censorship related questions keep pilling up. They’re spreading at such a vertiginous rate that it’s difficult to keep up with the debate. I’m not sure where this text is going, but I see it as an attempt to make sense of several things happening in the past few months. When confinement measures…

October 17, 2021December 11, 2021

O Canavial (The Cane Field)

I started to work on this image about four months ago. It’s been a long and extremely slow process. I was sure about the scale I would be working on (7 meters long by 1,5 meters high – 300gr watercolor roll paper) and the species I wanted to represent – o Canavial; the cane field…

August 22, 2021December 11, 2021

LESMA – Slow Photography Fest

caption (image above): some of the posters created for LESMA. Whatever the projects we get ourselves into, there’s always a decent amount of negligence involved, isn’t there? That’s how I feel when I think of this recent project I got myself into – LESMA (slug). Obviously, instead of “negligence”, I could have chosen a more…

August 1, 2021August 19, 2021

Grief and metal: all we want to do is breathe

It’s been seven days as I write this. Luva, one of the family dogs, left this world. The circumstances are still hard to process and detailing them is still not an option. I think part of the trauma that settled in was potentiated by having to deal with the possibility of loosing all my canine…

June 30, 2021July 1, 2021

Teaching and learning to transform emotion into creative energy

Just another end-of-the-academic-year post. Another academic semestre that made us all stretch our creative brains to make the best out of another confinement situation. Although my relationship with online classes is still one of rejection, I did learn something from what happened last year and was more resourceful this time around (or so I think).…

June 22, 2021June 23, 2021

What sets us (a)part

caption (image above): © Riccardo Angei, from Glue and Souls. I’d like to state, with a certain amount of certainty, that the only thing that sets men and women apart is that we’ll never be able to explain to men what it feels like to be a woman in a men’s world. They know, they empathize,…