Posters on the streets of Porto, Portugal. 2022.
1
We came to Porto because we knew very little about it. Our decision was made at short notice, meaning other more likely destinations were already too expensive. People we knew shared their travel plans: Greek islands, the south of France, rambling train rides through Eastern Europe. We chose to look elsewhere, but what surprised us most when we arrived was the steep incline of the city. Wandering through the wide boulevards and narrow streets seemed akin to hiking.
2
At the Serralves, a major museum in Europe’s art circuit, a small showing of work by artist Tarek Atoui explores the sound of various port cities: Athens, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut and Porto. The project, titled Waters’ Witness, involves recording the harbours at various locations, which Atoui would translate into modest sculptural forms: dial to control volume and other qualities of sound adjacent to hunks of marble, wires strewn around steel bars, circuits, wires and wood. Each piece exists as both an instrument and an art installation, giving the audience the option to sit on a piece of wood or stone and feel the harbour’s recording translated into a vibration.
The artist’s reading of Porto is idiosyncratic (apparently the city has a more organic sound and is therefore represented through wooden structures housing compost, worms, soil and plants), and I find myself interested in how this alternative account works as a sort of abstract portrait of cities, one which collects disparate geographies and histories through a material register.
3
A port city is an accidental meeting point between geography and geopolitics. The reasons why a specific city becomes an economic hub is often the result of decisions made elsewhere. War, regime collapse and shifting alliances all direct and divert flows of money, objects and people, with the story of each port city following its own rhythm of rise, decline and resurgence.
As I spend time in the city, I slowly piece together a sense of the place through historical tidbits and anecdotes. The Francesinha, a Portuguese sandwich originally from the city which is now largely eaten exclusively by tourists, was originally developed by a French explorer, Daniel David de Silva, who adapted croque-monsieur with local ingredients. A number of local restaurants promise the most authentic or traditional recipe, which is an impossibility due to the amount of local variants of the meal. Similarly, the production and trade of Port, the fortified Portuguese wine often served with dessert, was largely driven by tensions between Britain and France in the beginning of the 16th century, with British merchants seeking out alternatives to French wine amid war. Many of the most powerful Port traders were British at first, and over time others, like the Germans and the Dutch, entered the market.
4
While many of the family-run businesses have been sold to American hedge funds, it seems all the more paramount that they assert long family lineages of entrepreneurship. Again and again we encounter stories about fishermen, Port makers and sardine packers that follow the houses and warehouses stretching along the Douro river. An early economic life of Porto is celebrated here, ironically obscuring the present-day tourism that fuels the appetite for this story.
Other forms for narrative and counter-narrative are strewn across the city. A number of doors are marked with a sign that reads ‘Alojamento Local’, which denotes a short term rental property, most likely an AirBnb. Posters for housing protests can be found with increasing frequency the further you walk from the city centre, and assert moral claims (we have the right to housing!) alongside specific demands (social housing lists; homelessness; neighbours being replaced by tourists).
5
I find a few examples of travel writing about Porto that assumes the city is not your primary destination, but a place to pass through on a journey elsewhere, perhaps as a detour from Lisbon, and others who seem only able to read the city through the indistinct desires of others.
In a piece titled ‘The Portland of Portugal’, The New York Times celebrates the charm of a ‘walkable city’, and continues to offer a reading of the city through the generic vocabulary of contemporary tourism. The placelessness of this kind of travel writing is unsettling, but perhaps comes from a practical logic: to make the vastness of the world consumable for a narrow audience. But this distance goes in a strange direction: while they are enamoured with how Porto has resisted ‘the global march of coffee shops and fast-food chains’, they credit the city’s ‘self-effacing’ charm to the fallout of the 2008 recession which saw Portugal named as one of the P.I.I.G.S (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) and suffer massive austerity.
6
Also at the Serralves, a retrospective of Agnès Varda hangs around her relationship with Porto. Cities have often been a site of reinvention. In the anonymity of an urban sprawl, people leave their past behind to weave a new story around themselves. And it’s no different for Varda, who famously made a name for herself as a filmmaker before identifying as an artist in her later years. She had originally visited Porto as a filmmaker, and as part of a major commission for the show, she documented her return to the city as an artist: documenting her encounters with others, exploring her renewed perspective on familiar streets and buildings, wandering, talking, eating.