When I said the sun only hits the balcony in the afternoon in my last post, I was lying. The truth is, up until that point I hadn’t been awake before 10. I woke up at 8:15 am Thursday of my first week and there it was. I laughed out loud… but of course! The sun hits the other side of the balcony once a day too. This was an incentive to wake up even earlier and position my eventual house plants accordingly. I had a dream about a white rat in my oven, and a tree growing in a dark room, and immediately went out to go buy plants. I now have a jade plant on my balcony and a dumb cane inside.
How the city receives me…. Some days with an open blueprint and I feel I’m a co-creator, sometimes I feel flustered, but in an amusing way. There are plenty of awkward missteps. I live alone, but I’m not really alone. There are two mosquitoes living in my bedroom that only buzz close to my head when I’m about to go to sleep.
I wonder if the dream about a rat in my oven foretold the pigeon saga. Pigeons are, after all, the rats of the sky. There is at least one pigeon roosting and scratching and doing any number of pigeon things very loudly on my roof. When I first heard the scratching I thought it was a ghost? Then, there was a territorial breach. A pigeon fell or flew into the glass doors that open to the balcony. This was alarming and I didn’t go onto my balcony for the rest of the day.
Then I thought, maybe I’m being unfair to pigeons—they are living creatures. Maybe we could be friends. Upon doing a little research on pigeons I think I wasn’t being unfair. In fact, the pigeons are being unfair to me. Lisbon also seems to have more pigeons than people, and as an attempt to humanely reign them in, the city built a twelve-thousand euro pigeon hotel to attract the birds, and then initiated an elaborate reproductive ruse by replacing some of the eggs with plastic ones. Only some eggs, not all, lest the pigeons become suspicious that they were being had. I am not making this up. I don’t know the status of said pigeon hotel, but perhaps I will investigate more one day soon.
To be an artist is to commune more deeply with the unknown every day. In the face of so much brutality, how can we become softer?
Last week I visited Quinta da Regaleira, an estate in Sintra, which is about one hour by train from Lisbon. Sintra is a location where sated appetite and longing come together to roost. Lush green hills part to reveal castles, spires, and pops of color. Legend has it that the nobility used to take their lovers here. There are so many places to hide—a forest dense with secrets.
Quinta da Regaleira is enigmatic. The labyrinthine grounds were designed collaboratively between eccentric Brazilian transplant, António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro aka “Monteiro the Millionaire,” and Italian architect + set designer, Luigi Manini.
It was my third time to Sintra, and my second time to this Quinta. One of my favorite parts of these grounds is the initiation well. This day it was closed, waterlogged, and dripping from grottos.
It’s the anti-monument, a deep burrowing into the earth, connected to networks of underground tunnels. It’s meant to bridge realms. As above, so below… that kind of thing.
I want to move in. I want to host tea parties where everyone takes a little more LSD than they need to and we end up inverting the inverted tower and becoming accidentally initiated.
In Lisbon, I live in the Intendente neighborhood, which is adjacent to Mouraria, the medieval Moorish quarter. Mouraria and Alfama are the two neighborhoods that survived Lisbon’s 1775 earthquake when most of the city toppled, burned, or was washed away in the tide.
This neighborhood is in an early/ intermediary stage of gentrification. Some people still say they don’t feel safe in this part of town which is thinly veiled racism. This area, in particular, is known for its connection to sex work, drug trafficking, and immigrants mostly from India, China, and Portuguese-speaking African countries. It’s interesting to reflect how artists and art associations have helped accelerate this cycle of urban renewal…. the ouroboros of gentrification.
According to this source, the marketing and strategies of the state-led urban renewal initiatives in Mouraria were so effective, many people didn’t realize they were collaborators, even co-conspirators with the state and its efforts to gentrify the area and make it more appealing to private investors.
Artists as a Venus flytrap—the honey pot. They act as an inadvertent billboard to investors. Come here. Look at all these artists, these youth-led cooperatives. Shaking ass. Am I a pawn? Am I just a cog in a machine, inadvertently and always playing into the design of capital? The perspective of artists and students as marginal gentrifiers is not a new one—it’s a tale as old as time (sung in a Disney voice). Associations eventually contributing to their own demise… caught in an endless cycle of precarity, crowdfunding, and eventual displacement.
One site claims that the impacts of gentrification here have been ameliorated “with a thriving activist and cooperative scene” The site also problematically refers to the neighborhood as “Lisbon’s neglected child.” Cringe.
Sometimes when I have conversations about gentrification, it feels that there is a prevailing attitude of resignation—that urban “renewal” is a force as inevitable as the weather. Any resistance is performative, futile, too little, too late. And, I think it often feels this way because by the time inhabitants see the visible effects of gentrification or feel them through rent increases, the policies have been well underway for decades. It was a strategy so large, systemic, and violent so insidiously marketed in such a palatable way it is broadly accepted as a good thing.
Adding value to the community. Urban renewal. Does it matter? Hungry investor gazes. The same things that captivate and enrapture me also captivate and enrapture those with much deeper pockets—which is an arguably more dangerous captivation?
I can’t say I’m different. I can’t say I wouldn’t want to invest in something like renewal, especially in a place I love.
I’m witnessing the real-time creation of a sanitized landscape of leisure that’s also heavily policed. And the policing is ramped up because of pandemic restrictions. When I first arrived, there was police tape on benches, and everywhere. People sat defiantly, taking in the views. Now, things are re-opening, and the pulse is palpable.
Choosing where to live and where to play is political. In a city—no place is neutral.
Sitting at the top of Parque Eduardo VII, my local friend remarked “no one who is from here lives below this line.” I felt a sudden sense of vertigo. Guilt even, for participating in the playground of the old city, for not fully realizing this before.
The intimacy I feel with this place is universal… and particular. I’ve often felt as though I have an inside joke with Lisbon. The more conversations I have, the more I realize I’m not the only one who feels almost exactly this way— visitors and lifetime residents alike. There is a playful spirit, and it’s for everyone. There are synchronicities just for us, every one of us. Fucking Lisboa... she’s a polyamorous babe, motherly and loverly, a microcosm of a trickster universe. She, like each of us, is a paradox— full of contradictions and branching aspirations, containing ancient wisdom and youthful naivete. It’s …. a vibe.
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If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you so much for reading!!! Thank you for your time, attention, and engagement. This monthly newsletter will always be free. If you want to buy me a snack or help pay for new luxury pigeon hotel, my Venmo is @duffylala. But wait… there’s more!
writing news:
I’m facilitating a workshop this May with collective.aporia, a beautiful international, web-based artist collective. It’s going to be 4-weeks of joy, wonder, reverence, awe, and critique. This will be my most sustained pedagogical endeavor since leaving higher education. Read more & register here. <3
listening to on repeat:
Matadora—Sofi Tukker ~ big new moon in Aries energy
Slow Clap — Gwen Stefani & Saweetie ~ can’t even believe Gwen is 51 smh
Below the Clavicle—Eartheater ~ harps and primal screams/ yes pls.
and for the curious… if you want to go down some rabbit holes….
more on arts & gentrification in Mouraria & Intendente:
more on Quinta da Regaleira & Monteiro the Millionaire:
Quinta da Regaleira as My Internal World in Sintra (special shoutout to this committed blogger who wrote this sprawling post as if he were Monteiro himself. The comments section is also great).
your command of English >>>> 🖤
but I wonder....what was the cat showing you?