Emergency Contact

ex · EMERGENCY CONTACT 1 (live)

A personal account of life as a game of distances, written at a time when the restrictions associated with the pandemic were gradually being lifted. A collection of sound extracts, digital interface jingles, 2000s pop loops and self-tuned streams of consciousness.

This “emergency contact” opens up a contradiction: both the emergency contact as a code that overcomes distance, like a loved one, and the contact as anonymous, autonomous, emergency. This means that urgency acts here as a common denominator. Between a call to emphasise identity and another to divide it. A project in progress between lyric poetry and performance that will also take the form of a book in the near future.

A male-presenting artist performs into a microphone while seated at a table with audio gear, DJ controller and several stands with an audience seated behind him in a studio space.

A male artist leans over a table adjusting a laptop and music equipment in a sunlit room, with microphones, stands, towels, a pillow and seated audience members visible in the background.

A male artist performs to a microphone, looking at a sheet music stand.

A male artist performs to a microphone, reading annotated poetry on a sheet music stand. An over-the-shoulder shot.

A detail shot of a poem called "delay timer" with various pen and marker annotations. In the blurry background we see a make artist in a red sweater, very blurry.

Emergency Contact
live performance, variable duration

Work in development.

Gonçalo Lamas is a writer, filmmaker, artist and designer, born in Porto. After briefly studying film in Porto and Bournemouth, he attended the Fine Art course (media department) at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2017. In between, he spent a semester at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he joined Hito Steyerl's class and the Research Center for Proxy Politics.

In 2020, with a grant from the Porto City Council, he produced Boeing Nº 737-800 in F#m, staged over four dates at Culturgest Porto. An artist's book containing the play's text was launched at the 6th Artists' Self-Publisher’s Fair in London. His first work for cinema, the experimental documentary Granary Squares, shot in 2015, premiered in the National Competition of the 2021 edition of IndieLisboa. After several anthology appearances with Pilot Press, like Queer Anthology of Rage and Modern Queer Poets, some times zero hours was the title of his first poetry pamphlet, published by SPAM Press, Glasgow, in 2022. He is currently finishing his first poetry collection, titled Emergency Contact. Until 2024, he was part of the study programme at Le Fresnoy, in France, where he filmed a condensed film adaptation of Andromaque, written by Jean Racine in 1667, which he translated himself into English.

Among his many parallel activities, he designs and builds websites for artists and cultural organisations, teaches design strategies at the University of the Arts London, and was, between 2021 and 2023, an editor for a podcast on the news platform Novara Media.

In film and theatre, he has built up a string of collaborations as assistant director with artists such as Alle Dicu, João Nunes Monteiro, João Reis Moreira and Majid Al-Remaihi. With the latter, he is currently writing a film about the final days of Afonso de Albuquerque, the commander who in 1515 seized Hormuz, throttling the very strait that still brings the world to a standstill today.

Some of this I do for money, some of this I do for free.

I also write an occasional newsletter, called Contratempo.

Write me at by email if you have something to say. I am also on Instagram.