Twice a month, UMBIGO invites one person 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.

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Books

Florence and Baghdad, Renaissance Art and Arab Science
Hans Belting
Belknap Press, 2011

How a hole in the wall of an Egyptian prison gave rise to a theory of vision that becomes the concept of image which proliferates in Western culture.

Organ Grinder
Alan Fishbone
FSG Originals, 2017

The author rides his Harley to stroll through a series of short stories inspired by The Satires of Horacio. The rolling of the wheels promotes an apparently erratic “drive” like life.

Pliny on Art and Society
Jacob Isager
Routledge, 2010

Analysis and contextualization of books 33 to 37 of Pliny’s Natural History, something seldom attempted, centred on the relationship between man and nature, where there is a disappointment regarding the artistic exploration of his time as opposed to the purity of the moment of discovery, in which the act happens naturally and without excesses.

Le Banc du temps qui passe
Hubert Reeves
Le Seuil, 2017

Responsible for the awakening of many in astrophysics at an early age, in my case with Patience dans l’azur, at the age of 88 Hubert Reeves summarizes, in a natural and wise way, the essential themes that existence poses to him.

Podcast

Agora, agora e mais agora
Rui Tavares
Público

A demonstration of our time without touching it. [In Portuguese only.]

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Paulo Lisboa explores a set of ambiguities and oscillations that go from the absolute absence of image to the simulacrum, from the stain to the line, from an ethereal spatiality to the saturated presence of matter, in a laboratorial territory marked by consistent experimentation and a great discipline of artistic gesture, where materiality appears decomposed and resynthesized. At the same time, the manipulation of modern image machines and their phantasmagoria of light is converted into mechanical congemination of their own design. In each line, the mystery of the relationship between gesture, matter and thought is retraced.

Among his latest presentations are A SKELETON WALKS INTO A BAR …, Fundação Leal Rios, Lisbon 2020; ASTERISM, Sequence for Piano, Guitar and Projector (with Marco Franco and Francisco Cordovil), Serralves Foundation, Porto 2019; IMAGINES PLUMBI, Graça Brandão Gallery, Lisbon 2018.