An Essay from Cristiano Elias
Lisbon’s Booming
Boom Bap Boom
Brilingdaling Dalung
Along tiles and uneven cobblestone, paths of magic lights and sounds embark you on an adventure of somewhat old.
When you walk the city’s versed streets at night, in certain areas, you might just stumble upon a flautist or two, a guitar, banjo or some percussion and people gathering, drinking and dancing.
This persisted even at the peak of Covid lockdown, where a dance between people and cops became a nightly ritual: we artists would gather at the viewpoint, play and dance as long as we could, and the cops would disperse us only for us to return a while later or gather at the next spot.
If we survived this, why wouldn’t we survive massive gentrification? Art mirrors life and life always finds a way; the next time you’re in Lisbon just look at the infertile cobblestones and the green weeds that managed to grow there.
We live in a confusing world. Cities are just as chaotic as organised. Countless events and interactions fill our days, and even a small walk around the neighbourhood with an attentive eye can be exhaustingly existential. Lisbon, a weird mix between familiarity and chaos, sitting between fields and numerous hills (commonly marketed as “a cidade das sete colinas”, “the seven hillsTM city”), is reliving its Covid-interrupted westerner fame status which has had its impacts on its ecosystem, already highly dependent on the tourism economy.
On top of a hill sits Lapa (the name translates to limpet, those seashell snails that insist on sticking themselves to yachts), one of Lisbon’s affluent neighbourhoods, a new gallery opens its doors. There’s a big fuzz of zazou-core personalities existing on the streets and caricaturing themselves as extreme and unique individuals. They are serving wine and this hibiscus komboocha, 200 points stronger than beer. Inside lay modern art pieces around a sad, fanciless manifesto where art freaks gather. God knows how they support the rent.
Aliens are creeping in and they are coming from the upper classes. The vamps and vampires know not therapy beyond therapists’ door – something quite opposite to how we feel art in this corner of Europe. It’s no hobby for the rich. Those who do it are in need.
“Artist by choice? Why I prefer riding a bike!”, told us Mello e Castro, a Portuguese writer back in the 80’s, pertaining to a transitioning generation that just six years prior lived under one of the longest running censoring dictatorships, the Estado Novo (lit. “New State”).
The idea that artists are living their dream and passion and therefore have nothing to complain about and should even suffer is sadly still based on both the Old grey-l⦿⦿king Eye of stigma
against the artist – let them be seen as debauchee layabouts or moral bonkers – and by economic strings pulled tight together. Suffering here becomes intertextual to the public understanding of the artist. The fallacy is subtle: artists don’t suffer because they make art, but the other way around; it’s not the artists’ essence that they should suffer but rather They create art because they have suffered. This attitude was even at one point politically officialized when in the 1980s the then secretary of state for culture said that “artists should have monetary instability because it creates an environment favourable to creation”. A brutal form of exploration that feeds itself from the romantic artist myth.
It becomes a strange world to navigate disconnected from the present. Artists aim for the future and hope that the future aims back at them. To avoid the sacrifice of expressive authenticity, risk dying in misery.
Furthermore and dissonantly, it is expected that in the context of a palliative society this too should be threatened
On another of Lisbon’s hills, lies one of the most idiosyncratic neighbourhoods. Bairro das Colónias (translates to colonies neighbourhood)–whose foundations were laid on celebrating the success of Portuguese colonies–is now, ironically, populated with mostly foreigners. Together, musicians gather on the centre square and play witty tunes, from Irish folk to Cumbia, Samba, Choro and other world music. They’ve idolised the bohemian, the troubadour and singer-songwriter. Perhaps it was the cheap beer and lifestyle that attracted them in the first place; perhaps they found solace in the warm weather at the corner or Europe. They frequent the same circuit of small associations, some they’ve helped build, extending from free membership spots, to open mic cafés and even tascas, a kind of Portuguese tavern. These places are held together by different forces – in the case of bars, by the market force, highly dependent on clients, whereas associations solely by the people who make them up. This circuit provides a platform for performing and meeting other musicians. One bar in particular, whose rise to fame has held the likes of Madonna and became a routine stop for visitors with some kind of celebrity status, has survived the gentri-wave, mostly because its owner has taken good care of it. When the doors close, they’ll stray to the nearest Miradouro to keep the lively atmosphere on.
This varied ecosystem of associations in Anjos lived a golden age pre-Covid. Now fortunately the same is happening although way more scattered around Lisbon, due to rents having gone up. Far from and in the middle of revolting waves of tourists crashing their feet and smashing their faces against club doors, new movements grow and are felt effervescing. As wide ranging as ambient, free jazz, music from the diasporas and folk each finds its own niche. The internet greatly accelerated the spawning of all kinds of movements, but knowing about these events is downright by word of mouth mostly – a traditional way of preserving its essence, whatever that is. There is a wide variety springing forth from the depths of the covid depression, lack of funding, free market and Lisbon’s economic boom. They are turning garages into collective spaces, box rings into cultural associations, and taking back the city not for tradition but for interdisciplinary artistic transience. While it is fair to say that most are born from those who can, that is, either inherited spaces or with capital to invest, there is a balanced approach to programming and a whole lot has been done to dynamize Lisbon’s cultural scene.
“So what can we do? Why, precisely that: Do. Create. Gather. Move.”
Future Market Perspectives
What might seem like a diversified flora of artistry coming together will inevitably be distorted
by foreign income. We’ve seen it first with cafés: brunch fads, whose charm has not been limited to foreigners, but also to particular classes of local citizens. Then Airbnb took over, desertifying neighbourhoods.
Every European capital downtown has been thunderstruck by capitalism's paradigm. The historical centres, whose value is at its peak (value in this sense being commonly understood and intersected between capitalism's notion of commodity value and a shared notion of cultural value), are ridden with multi-national, luxury brands and fast food fast fashion chains. Isn’t it telling that what is able to survive in the most cost burdened zones of the city, and therefore what this system holds as most valuable, is consumables and luxury’s identity markers?
Just this past week, a neighbourhood café had its doors closed much to locals dismay3 – it was the place to meet and the only of its kind that kept prices local. Many artistic projects have found their beginnings out of these coffee meetings.
The rents have gone up. We can expect a fancy hotel or brunch or 5€ happy hour bucket beer to sprout. It represents a massive loss in the fight against system exploiters. When these cracks in the system reveal themselves to be unbearable, they will look back at places like these. Balance means every piece of the ecosystem is necessary. I remember in this same neighbourhood seeing little tiles on the walls depicting cases of evicted people, be it families, artists, locals whose whole life was spent there.
Market forces if not acted upon will inevitably asphyxiate these movements (or in the worst of cases, appropriate them). Turning the city centre into an entertainment park for tourists leaves no place for growth. Whatever these market forces are, we can see their almost unmatched machinery-like blindness. Their danger lies in the lack of appearance. There is no direct visibility – we can only see its effects.
So.
Is all hope lost?
Why certainly not.
Thanks to the amazing capability of adaptation we can hope that parallel movements eventually emerge: The ingrown roots movements will always survive, but as rent keeps pushing its limits, we will likely see a decrease or a displacement of these art centres into the outskirts of Lisbon (that has already happened with Cais do Sodré, a previous cultural centre which has now become a bachelor’s party playground for young lads).
But even so, Lisbon’s centre still holds beautiful places where local projects have a platform. A kind of coexistence is possible through cooperative models.
So what can we do? Why, precisely that: Do. Create. Gather. Move.
In this sense every non-funded, true artistic act has become a political act–not the kind for discourse, but for the one who acts. There’s no right blue da ba dee da ba daa print to follow. Curiosity usually leads better than direct order. In this sense you could dialogue with local markets and communities that are thriving. Why are they succeeding?
You could dialogue with yourself. What matters to you? To your community? You could: Share your ideas with people around you; Prepare and move, not necessarily in that order; Usurp corporate organisational skills in favour of culture; Look around for spaces and propose events; meet people.
Find an alley or any abandoned spots and give them a new life for a few hours. Be grateful and open minded.
Forget all of the above.
Creating is an act of forgetting.
Act.
If your environment is steady and stale, corrupt it; Little by little an avalanche takes shape.
“The internet greatly accelerated the spawning of all kinds of movements, but knowing about these events are by word of mouth mostly – a traditional way of preserving its essence, whatever that is.”
1 Carlos Amado, Filipe Rocha Silva, and Mafalda Osório, “A condição do artista”, Arte Opinião, no. 11, (Summer 1980): 37-45, LINK
2 Cf. Kugelmann, Robert. (2022). The Palliative Society: Pain Today: Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 2021, 76 pp, hardback ISBN: 13-978-5095-4723-4. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. 10.1057/s41282-022-00332-x.
3 Eunice Lemos, “Café O das Joanas: um adeus ao Intendente como o conhecemos”, A Mensagem, May 24, 2023, LINK