Places of disquiet
Since I was born, I had to visit the land of my parents to spend time with relatives and friends, who often lived in commuter towns or in smaller villages around the center of Portugal. For a long time, I couldn’t relate to the attractive stories I had come to hear about the country from others. The images of my past arise from places like Barreiro, Queluz, Vilar Formoso, Sintra or Guarda. Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago wrote a travelogue about his country, a book called “Journey to Portugal”. Saramago travels through hundreds of villages and cities and romanticizes churches, castles, historical architecture and landscapes. In very few passages of the book however, Saramago describes spaces he experiences in between these romanizations, places of cultural crime and insane nightmares.