In the old fado houses of Lisbon there is a custom that has outlasted almost everything else about them. When the singing is about to begin, someone says: silêncio, que se vai cantar o fado. Silence, fado is about to be sung.
The lights are lowered. The room becomes quiet. Before a single note is sung, fado has already made its presence felt. The intimate space grows heavy with silence; the audience sit in hushed anticipation.
Valda Bailey drops her phone. It clatters loudly and dramatically onto the stone floor.
Of course.
We did not move to Portugal for its music. We came for the Atlantic. We came to once again be a part of Europe (it is an act of personal redress that we arrive the same week as the ten year anniversary of the referendum). And we came to find a village too small and too unpolished to appear on anyone's list of destinations.
Nevertheless, you cannot live inside a culture for long before its art starts probing. It feels like an almost fated convergence that the question Portuguese culture has been asking for centuries is not a million miles away from where I am right now with my work. Namely, what do you do with loss?
Camões grappled with it. In his hands, saudade became one of Portuguese literature’s great emotional landscapes: a longing for what is absent, lost, unreachable, remembered, or perhaps never fully possessed. Pessoa too. it. He turned the question inward, into the solitary space, a life half-lived in thought.
And fado has been giving it voice, in small rooms and public houses, for the best part of two centuries.. The answer is always a version of the same thing: you give the ache a form, and you make the form beautiful.
Fado is also the easiest thing in Portugal to get wrong. There is a tourist version, available nightly within a sardine’s throw of any Lisbon hotspot. Melancholy is the vibe and saudade comes printed on the tea towels. Its subtleties are so easily flattened into a beautiful sadness with a guitar.
There is also an art-world version, and this is undoubtedly where I am far more at risk. Cultural appropriation. Any curious traveller with a camera will be aware of the dangers. How easy it would be to bestow a haze of imported sorrow upon a coastal abstraction like the soft silver mist that rolls in daily. Melancholy seascapes. Yearning as a Lightroom preset. I did not grow up with fado, and of course I cannot begin to fully understand it. As a recent immigrant, I have no business repurposing a culture that is not mine, layering it on top of my own work as a gratuitously gloomy glaze.
The most obvious thing about fado is its mood. But what about its structure? Maybe that is where I could look for a connection.
The word itself comes from fatum, fate. The performance has its codes: often a singer who barely moves, a twelve-stringed guitarra circling its figures, a repertoire of forms inside which the voice is free. Extreme feeling held inside severe constraint. Nobody flails. The grief is real and the discipline is total, and perhaps it is the case that one is only bearable because of the other. That tension between feeling and restraint is familiar territory in abstraction.
Saudade rewards the same treatment. We are usually told it is untranslatable, which is true but not especially useful. Teixeira de Pascoaes, who spent a career on the question, defined it in 1913 as "the action of desire on remembrance and of remembrance on desire". A movement, not a state.
In one of Pessoa’s voices, it appears on the quay, among ships, departures, and the ache of elsewhere. Watching a ship leave, the longing arrives before he can name what it is for. It is not on the ship and not on the quayside. It is the widening gap between them. For anyone who makes pictures, that is a compositional gem. The space between two things is the subject.
Where to draw the line between drawing on a culture and decorating with it? I am not going to photograph fado singers or print their lyrics over murky seascapes (and you really can hold me to this). What I hope to take is structural. Repetition with variation: pattern interrupted. The guitarra returns to its phrase the way the wave returns to the shore, never quite the same twice. My instinct is to connect this to the plate returning through my etching press. Or the emotion contained within the widening gap
Currently, the poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen feels closer to me than fado does. Not because I am intimately familiar with her work, but from what little I have read, her Atlantic gives me no ready-made sadness to borrow. It is clean, hard, physical. Light, salt, distance and force.
What about blue? Portuguese blue. The azulejo tradition lines this country’s churches, stations and stairwells with blue-and-white stories. It is easy to read the tiles simply as decoration, but they are closer to diagrams: the sea, or a life, encoded, repeated, set in a grid and made to hold still. Rebecca Solnit wrote of The Blue of Distance. Perhaps, here, it becomes The Blue of Elsewhere.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, whose tiles are in the Lisbon metro, spent a lifetime making grids misbehave. Her paintings often begin with structure: interiors, tiled spaces, the suggestion of streets or shelves or scaffolding. But the structure is never quite fixed. It wobbles a bit as if the order was being remembered rather than measured with precision.
And underpinning everything is the language. The damned language. So fiendishly difficult to get your tongue around. Let alone get started on verb conjugation. Some of the words that have stayed with me have impinged on my work. Estrago, (damage), gave an ongoing body of work its title. Fado is beginning to give the next one a structure.
The Atlantic I photograph is not an abstract idea of ocean. It is this Atlantic: Portuguese, battered by wind, crossed by histories I am only beginning to understand. I am learning it the way you learn a language as an adult: slowly, haltingly, with embarrassing errors, corrected usually by Carlos at the bar with his jokey “go home English”. At least I think it's a joke.
I will never sing fado. This seems to me the correct outcome for all concerned. But the silence before the song is not owned by anyone. It is a practice any of us might adopt. Lower the lights, stop the talk, try to give the loss a form and make the form as beautiful or as meaningful as you can manage.
And maybe put the phone in your pocket.