some times zero hours

The "some times zero hours" pamphlet onboard a Central line underground train, wherein the seats have a pattern with the London skyline.

Gonçalo Lamas’ some times zero hours is a something of a ‘common place’, through the perils and preciousness of London living seen from the vantage-point of pandemic time; the continual crisis at present as the subtended contemporary arcs through the plenum we call social life. Drifting through digitally-mediated urban environs, prosodically and metonymically, through states of anxiety, irony, distaste and waywardness, the corporate capture of the everyday resisted and retold in spates of bodily motion and semantic resignification. We move together in Lamas’ foretelling assembly.

– Kashif Sharma-Patel

some times zero hours A black sneaker on the sidewalk, on the right. On the left, a footprint on the concrete from a similar shoe size. An accordion of McDonald's £1.99 vouchers which used to come on the back of Oyster card receipts or on the pages of the Metro newspaper. On the floor of a London bus, a ripped bit of a page from a newspaper where one can read: EDEN OUT THE DOOR. some times zero hours A coin jammed inside that rubbery line by the bus window.

'some times zero hours', A5 pamphlet, 40pp, edited by SPAM Press, May 2022.

Cover design by Maria Sledmere.

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.

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