Once a week, 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.

Umbigo has been publishing this section since the beginning of the pandemic.

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Book

[…] Ensaio sobre os mestres
Pedro Eiras
Documenta
2017

Essay on the masters, by Pedro Eiras, an amazing exercise in literary topography, an atlas of citations, a book without authorship that never begins and never ends, giving us back the enchantment of listening and the appetite for reading. [Portuguese only]

Tv-show

Devs
Alex Garland
2020

A 2020 series directed by Alex Garland, propitious to the context of confinement. It is a strange sci-fi essay that speculates about the relationship of fascination and fear that humans have with this announced abyss that we remembered to call the future.

Music

Um Argentino no Deserto
René Bertholo
Matéria Prima

The reissue of Um Argentino no Deserto by René Bertholo from the mythical publisher of Porto, Matéria Prima. Integrating a collection dedicated to electroacoustic music – that offers forgotten records of composers such as Cândido Lima, Filipe Pires or Armando Santiago – the miraculous album by the artist from Ribeira do Álamo is again available, now grooved in the vinyl.

Radio

Rádio Estação

Anti-radio, nomadic or “in abyss”, Rádio Estação was created to echo the sounds and silences of Porto Crystal Palace’s Gardens during the Porto Book Fair in 2020. Available at the invisible site of Porto City Museum, it features a grid in permanent deconstruction that brings together sound experimentation, generative compositions, unpublished or forgotten recordings, urban surveys or breathed words. For Umbigo 5 cultural suggestions there are two highlights: in a second confinement period, the sound replacement of Gonçalo M. Tavares O Diário da Peste, a powerful writing exercise without a grid and in direct reaction with the cursed times we live in; Colapso, a program by Tomás Cunha Ferreira and Domenico Lancelotti, “a collage or a collision of voices and sounds, a constant movement between construction and destruction, one being the other, changing the turns that the world takes, reaching the inner nature”.

Drawing

Atlas de Botanique Poétique
Francis Hallé
Flammarion

A wonderful graphic chart to seek inspiration and to prepare for the lockdown easing, and the body and mind opening to the invisible world of plants.

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Nuno Faria is currently the artistic director of Porto City Museum and an invited assistant professor at the ESAD-School of Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha.

Between 2013 and 2019, he was artistic director of the José de Guimarães International Center for Arts. Between 1997-2003 and 2003-2009, he worked at Instituto de Arte Contemporânea and at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, respectively. He lived and worked in the Algarve between 2007 and 2012 where, among other projects, he founded (in Loulé in 2009) the Mobilehome – nomadic art school, experimental and independent.