Patrícia Portela

Music, food, aromas almost always transport us to good memories, as they are very intense and almost secret personal spaces that not even the most cruel repressor can oppress or destroy. After a catastrophe, a separation, a loss or an isolation like the one that many experienced at this moment, good memories can assault us in the most unexpected moments through a taste, a melody, a play or a story, and awaken in us a recognition, a memory, a landscape long forgotten, robbing us of a smile. This project was started before a third of the world was quarantined. Looking out the window, this is a Porto, unknown to all, native inhabitants, foreigners, newcomers. Habits have changed, the pace has changed, the sound, the smell of the city is different. What good memories will we have of this time? What good memories do we want to recall during this period to accompany us at this moment? In regular seminal contact via email and online meetings, the participants and Patrícia Portela answer these questions and also create their memories.


PATRÍCIA PORTELA (1974) creates performances and literary works, living between Portugal and Belgium. She studied stage design (Lisbon), space dramaturgy (Utrecht and Antwerp), film (Ebeltoft) and philosophy (Leuven). Known both at home and abroad for her unique works, she collected several awards, of which she highlights the Madalena de Azeredo Perdigão/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Award for Flatland I (2005) and the Theatre in the Decade Award for Wasteband (2003). She made the shortlist of the 2015 Media Art Sonae Award with the installation Parasomnia, which is still touring the world. She was the first literary grantee at the Portuguese Embassy in Berlin, Germany, in 2016, and she writes chronicles for the newspaper Jornal de Letras since 2017.

LEONARDO RIBEIRO SIMÕES was born in Viseu, in 1964. In 1985, he joined the Lisbon Theatre and Film School to study film. He completed his bachelor’s degree in 1990, and started working as a freelance camera assistant in film productions. His first feature as a cinematographer came in 2002 with Antes que o Tempo Mude, by Luís Fonseca. In 2007, he completed a degree in scriptwriting. He worked as cinematographer or cameraman with artists from different fields — theatre, video art, music video, documentary film and fiction film. He highlights the collaborations with film directors Pedro Costa, Pedro Caldas, Joaquim Sapinho and Vítor Gonçalves, artists João Onofre, Vasco Araújo, Jemima Stehli and Stan Douglas, and theatre director Patrícia Portela.