Sexto Olhar

Lídia Jorge text

Sara Feio digital drawing in real time

Susana Menezes reader

"(...) If I did not belong to this city, I would leave in peace, as I leave the cities to which I do not belong, I only walk there, I dine there, I watch the night fall, I visit. I take notes, summarise the story, and fall asleep with a vague longing. Nothing else. (...) However, when you belong to a city, you cannot go so fast, nor sit glass in hand, looking at the surface. I am from this city, and I know that the village is alive in it, it still has the contemporary flame of the memory of when the city was the Village of Loulé. I take this memory, this overwrought primordial look, collected on the paved sidewalks of Rua do Matadouro, where arches were made and festivities lasted all night long. Of Rua Serpa Pinto, the image of our door. In the Garden of San Francisco, there is still the shadow of my red fish, gliding in the lake on which I fell, now different, the same drop of water. The same trees. I know the streets still have curves of my stones, the rags of my walls and battlements, I still see the Bandstand getting ready, the instruments playing in the evening, martial and lyrical. We sat on the garden benches, leaned against the thresholds. Children, we slept on our mothers’ and neighbours’ laps. We woke over their shoulders as we crossed the Largo dos Chafarizes. All vague memories, as lights in one and yet as intimate and necessary as the taste of one's own language. There is nothing to do - When part of us belongs to a city, between us and it, there is a glass that enlarges, breaks and recomposes it in an imaginary way. The city becomes a powerfully different entity. A sixth look is exerted on it. (...)".

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Lídia Jorge in  “Sexto Olhar”

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Credits

text: Lídia Jorge

lecture: Susana Menezes 

digital drawing in real time: Sara Feio

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Bio Lídia Jorge

She was born in the Algarve, spent some decisive years in Angola and Mozambique, graduated in Romance Philology at the University of Lisbon, taught, wrote more than twenty books published in several languages, including novels, anthologies of short stories, a play. In 2014, she was awarded the Luso-Spanish Prize for Arts and Culture granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport and the Portuguese Secretary of State for Culture.

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