Public Display of Attention

The road to somewhere is a tetris match against the walk in sidewalk of the promise me bullshit jobs no automatic capitalization or guaranteed sanitation beyond zone 3 of the ego is a ghost scaring the bones: i hate bullies so i’ve become one POW WOW NOW would be fair but i’m perfectly okay with just NOW. There are already too many people with a telescope on regimes of truth i didn’t sign my sovereignty to my legs hurt because thinking against the future about the future because thinking because the future won’t spell much dexterity to any of my tentatively public limbs, & i don’t even get many take-away drinks but i know the political is also espresso foam & every added sum but right here too, and mainly, dandruff washed off those mega sweet grapes from Aldi times the Met helicopter casting shade over the sink eating, voracious a blunt shadow to spite the shimmer around water drops left on read, mid-flight a mid-night in mid-day. Surely, this too is proof that relativity can be as Special and General as my libidinal economy, besides, HOW CAN EVERY GRAPE BE SEEDLESS !? * ?? ?! !!* As for statecraft, well, there’s no infinite reach on the air above and below the ground. To paraphrase some academic footnote on constitutional spaces: any two straws sharing the same milkshake can spurt equity disputes among drinkers; a rather fatuous species/world perpetual bias nature made up for colonial stock a zero-sum game which any linguistic fire work may very well shrug off for all autonomy is concerned with semantics. Enjambment, bio & logical, may be the most honest way to be a fool: drink the cup dry, but spit it back in.

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

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.

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

Write me at if you have something to say. I also write an occasional newsletter, called Contratempo. And, sometimes, I am on Instagram too.