Teaching in the Academia: I quit

I learned to love teaching. It didn’t come naturally. The first couple of years were really hard, but it got better. I studied different pedagogical approaches, learned from students and colleagues and discovered ways to adapt without having to sell my soul. As in other areas in my life, sometimes I overworked, others I self-sabotage…

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“A Heartwarming Feeling”

Something weird is happening in the way I relate to images and, therefore, talk and write about them. In part, this is the result of a complex internal process, somehow related to exercises aimed at letting the mind wander in different directions. On the other hand, I’m aware this is also the result of the…

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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/…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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“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…

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