Every week, UMBIGO invites two people to share their 5 cultural suggestions. What can we do at home? From a book to a podcast, album or film: here are recommendations from artists, curators, gallery owners, cultural activists, friends.

We will share the recipe for what makes us better, and we remain united and positive.

—

António Olaio

Book

Punks and Drunks and Flicks and Kicks
Richard Strange
2002
In paperback and audio version – The testimony of a prominent figure of the London art/musical scene, both a precursor of punk and someone surpassed by the hegemony of punk in the 70s. It’s also relevant for the humoristic approach, the way he reinvents himself and what he does and did.
Link: https://www.richardstrange.com/

Poem

The Keeper of Sheep
Alberto Caeiro
1925
Because indifference can unite subjectivity and/or the expectation of subjective with the infinite ambiguity of the objective world. With statements like: “If there were no imperfection, there would be one thing less”. The unanimity of Fernando Pessoa’s work does not affect astonishment and discovery one bit (nor some unbearably emphatic readings… in that which should be read/said as if it had no importance at all…)

Record

The B 52’s
1979
The yellow album, the first with only the band’s name on it. The most glamorous universe in the possibility of an alternative reality. From a time when everything seemed possible in the interplay between unlikely things, the audacity of not fearing the irrelevance that punk made emerge, just to become something else, or rather, many other things…

Art Piece

La Cohorte Invencible or La Coorte Invincibile
Giorgio De Chiricco
1928
A painting (fortunately, we can see it in Portugal, at the Berardo Collection Museum). It was part of an exhibition at the gallery L’Effort Moderne of Léonce Rosenberg in 1928. It marked the abandonment of metaphysical painting (or the apparent abandonment), which turned Chiricco into an outcast in the art world (this shift pissed the surrealists off! And how paradoxical would its presence be in a gallery that looked at itself as a participant in the modern “effort”…). This work will be the fuel for an exhibition curated by myself and Hugo Barata for the College of Arts. In fact, it was Hugo Barata who reminded me that the piece is right around the corner.

Film

Amarcord
Fellini
1973
The pure artifice, even in his most autobiographical film. Probably because it is.

—

António Olaio, artist, assistant professor of the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra. Director of the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra. Solo exhibitions in Coimbra, Lisbon, Porto, Guimarães, Mallorca, New York, Berlin, Frankfurt. As a researcher, he explores the conceptual potentialities of art as an object and instrument of reflection, particularly the relations between the individual and space, between plastic experience and architecture. Among his publications, I think differently, now that I can paint reveals the latitude of his conceptual intervention as a plastic artist, and Ser um indivíduo chez Marcel Duchamp, based on the latter’s work, emphasizes the work of art as a reflexive production.