Contemporânea

Lisbone Abysmée, c. 1755
Psychogeography, Royal Book Lodge, 2026
Daniel Blaufuks, A personal earthquake, 2026
Fátima Moreno, trembling drawings, 2022–2023
Anne Lefebvre, L’Auvergne, 1992
A geologist testing the surface of a fault, 2005
Isadora Neves Marques, The Earth hath bubbles, as the water has, 2026
Ay-O, Cloth Line – World Trade Center, 1977
Bruno Zhu, Terrorism, 2026
André Príncipe, Tokyo, 2009/2026; New Gibelina, 2023
Nikola Tesla, “earthquake machine”, 1894 
Catalog of Earthquake-Related Sounds, 1974–1981

On the 28th of February, 1969, an earthquake with a magnitude estimated between 7.3 and 8.0 on the Richter scale was the strongest to strike mainland Portugal in the twentieth century. It occurred at 3:41 a.m. (CET), with its epicentre southwest of Cape St. Vincent. It caused thirteen deaths (two as a direct result), extensive damage in the Algarve, and widespread panic, especially in Lisbon.

This is Wikipedia’s description of the first earthquake I ever felt, whose memory has never left me. I see now that it corresponds to the truth, or at least confirms the plausibility of my memory, given the time of the event, recorded with encyclopaedic detail in the lines above. I remember waking up, in the middle of the night indeed, in my childhood bedroom on the fifth floor of an apartment building in Lisbon's Avenidas Novas district. Objects falling from the shelves, the screams of my brother, and my mother bursting into the room, likely terrified herself, trying to calm us. The mental image of the shelves and their contents trembling—picture frames, ornaments, small toys, perhaps even books—crashing onto the floor, accompanied by a rumbling that, to this day, seems to have risen from the Earth's core, remains with me like a nightmare from which we awaken but never fully escape. What stayed with me was an overwhelming sense of our fragility before the natural world, the awareness that in reality it takes only a few seconds to lose—not only life itself, as happened to thirteen people that late February—but also life as we had known it up to that point. Perhaps it is still that image, among many equally powerful others, that continues to guide me today. The fear of a specific threat, once experienced, never truly leaves us.

Among the many aftershocks, the strongest came at 5:28, with severe repercussions in Lisbon. According to the newspaper Diário de Lisboa, it was a night of panic in which "the entire country was shaken before dawn." Meanwhile, República reported that "seized by panic, thousands of people fled into the streets, half-dressed," alongside a photograph of damaged buildings on São Mamede Street and a nocturnal image of a half-destroyed car surrounded by onlookers now fully dressed for the occasion—in raincoats and overcoats. Meanwhile, according to the same newspaper, another “earthquake” was unfolding on the other side of the world: the Viet Cong offensive, where “fighting raged at the gates of Saigon.” At the same time, in another earthquake that continues to this day, Lebanon was struggling to recover from an Israeli attack on Beirut Airport, carried out in retaliation for attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Wars are, in many ways, like earthquakes—except they are not natural. A few seconds are all it takes for us to lose everything.

We, however, were not among the thousands who fled into the streets. I know my mother stayed in our bedroom. I remember her embrace. I can imagine we tried to go back to sleep, though a fear of further aftershocks would not let us. According to the seismic station at Serra do Pilar, there were 47 aftershocks between February 28 and March 28. A few months later, in an entirely unrelated event, mankind landed on the Moon for the first time, making 1969 a year of intense emotions for a five-year-old child.

Lisbon and Portugal were fortunate that time and have, in fact, remained so ever since, considering that their architecture—or rather, their building practices—continue to pay little heed to even the most basic safety standards required to withstand a major earthquake, should one strike. And it almost certainly will. Thirty years later, it was the summer of 1999. The heat was unbearable, even at night. No longer a five-year-old child, I once again felt the floor of my room tremble—this time in the venerable Londra Hotel in Istanbul. The tremor lasted only a few moments—a fleeting terror, almost nothing. Yet in those same moments, eighteen thousand three hundred and seventy-three people lost their lives, forty-eight thousand nine hundred and one were injured, and five thousand eight hundred and forty simply disappeared. The accounts, especially from the area around İzmit, still echo in my mind: people trapped beneath the rubble using their mobile phones to call for help until their batteries died. Those were the Nokia days, before phones had GPS or location services; and even if they had, the vast mountains of rubble would have made rescue extraordinarily difficult. Even in the suburbs of Istanbul, some seventy kilometres from the epicentre, the devastation was unmistakable when I visited a few days later. The few photographs I managed to take before I felt ashamed of being there show modest apartment buildings collapsed like houses of cards, buildings much like those of the same period that can be found in any Portuguese suburb. Einstürzende Neubauten. It was like looking at a possible future. I still have the photographs to prove it. They are not very good photographs, because photographing horror is not something everyone can do.

A year later, I set off on an extraordinary road trip through northern India, a region then shaken by repeated hate crimes against the country's Muslim population. It was the beginning of a social and political process in which Hinduism, nationalism, and fascism were becoming intertwined, with consequences that are even more evident today. The filmmaker Saeed Mirza—who inspired Salman Rushdie's portrayal of the gardener in The Satanic Verses, and whose small crew I had joined—had begun shooting a series of short films for an NGO about the recent attacks in several parts of the country, including the immolation of Muslims in their own homes, most notably in the state of Gujarat. The perpetrators were, in large part, the victims' neighbours, who unleashed pogroms eerily similar to those inflicted upon Jews a century earlier in Russia and Poland. Between interviews and filming, we found time to sample what was reputed to be the finest gulab jamun in all of India at an unassuming roadside stall; to travel to Ladakh in Indian Tibet, eating and vomiting momos along the way because of the altitude; and to spot a rat the size of a cat one night in Lucknow. Yet it was in Gujarat that I was captivated by the warmth and customs of the people of Kutch, with the pale eyes of its children—perhaps a sign of anaemia—and above all with the city of Bhuj, whose people were cheerful and vibrantly dressed, and whose architecture was unlike anything else I had seen in India. We spent several days filming there, while I wandered with my camera making portraits of men, women, and children. Everyone seemed beautiful to me, and everyone wanted to be photographed. When I returned to Lisbon, I printed a selection of those photographs on my home printer and assembled a small album in a plastic sleeve folder. Looking at them from a distance, all those people and all those images seemed almost unreal to me, as though those days had been dreamt rather than lived. Some time later, through a combination of bad luck and my own carelessness, every digital file from that journey—from Mumbai to Tibet and beyond, passing close to Kashmir—was lost when a memory card failed. It was the early age of digital photography, a technology that I now often think has done the world more harm than good, and for me that was the first warning. Not a single photograph survived except those small printed images of Bhuj. Then, only a few months after my return, on 26 January 2001—India's Republic Day—an infinitely greater tragedy struck. At 8:46 that morning, the Earth shook with devastating force, followed by 107 aftershocks over the course of the following year. In Bhuj alone, ten thousand eight hundred people were killed, one hundred and sixty-seven thousand were injured, and 95% of the city's buildings—including hospitals, schools, and ancient temples—were destroyed or left uninhabitable. The city that had fascinated me vanished, just as the photographs from that journey did. The conflicts between Hindus and the Muslim minority, unfortunately, did not—they only grew worse. And now, when I try to remember the lost city of Bhuj, all I can recall are the faces of the people in the equally lost photographs I took of them.

The years passed, and earthquakes—and, alas, their maritime counterparts, tsunamis—continued to follow one another, often with the devastating consequences we readily watch in astonishment on television. They are not only unmistakable reminders of our helplessness before Nature, but also of our human fragility, even as we continue to behave as though we owned the planet. I have felt a wall tremble in Graça, Lisbon. One night, my bed jolted in Birre. I have watched cracks and fissures suddenly appear in walls and pavements—small incidents, nothing much. In Japan, I saw buildings designed to shift by several metres and towers with enough flexibility to withstand the highest readings on the infamous Richter scale. Yet that scale cannot measure our inner upheavals, all the personal earthquakes that shape our lives. Those are measured on other scales: through texts, poems, films, works of art, choreographies, sounds, music—through everything that is essential if we are to remain empathetic human beings, aware that only a few moments are enough for the comfort we take for granted to collapse around us. And then, at any moment, any one of us could become homeless, a refugee, an exile, a migrant, those whom our societies—so contemporary, so postmodern, so inclusive—tend to dismiss.

It is commonplace to use geological terms for emotional events. Say, “earth-shattering,” or “the ground opened beneath my feet,” “an aftershock” or “simmering beneath the surface.” Think of: “I’m submerged” or “a deluge of feelings,”or  even “I was drowning.” Passionate expressions such as, “I’m on fire”, or “a storm of feelings” and “an emotional desert.” Are these but facile metaphors? Or might we see them as an unconscious reaching out to the earth on which we stand when in the midst of a momentous life event? A psychological attachment to our groundings, or a sort of emotional limit beneath which the only linguistic escape route is the dissolution of our egoic selves into an ecology of telluric moods. 

One option is to see these metaphors, sometimes analogies, as mnemonics of evolutionary biology, an instinctive “return to the womb,” to use Sándor Ferenczi’s vocabulary. Another option is to follow Lacan, following Freud, and see these geological events as a rupture, the sudden revelation or rapture of the Real. There is little difference between Ferenczi’s regressus ad uterum and Freud’s oceanic feeling; or, rather, the difference between them is one of degree: what is the womb, and what of its scale—human or planetary? As for the Real, it is not an image, but the disappearance of all images.

Think of obsessive ruminations and compulsive intrusions, which conceal and relay the unamenable—the all-too-Real. The true, earth-shattering OCD that manifests itself as a refusal of the vertigo of oceanic feeling, grasping for the shore or holding on to whichever tree branch through somatization. But think also of those overwhelming events over which we are powerless, no matter how much we protest or find strength and unity in a collective (yet another, more precarious form of egoic dissolution), like an all-too-Real war and a genocide. In those instances, it is as if the Earth is not enough and the ground barely solid—then, as in the psychoanalytical transference, our language finds a home in the earth’s ecosystem, the original home. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind,” wrote Marx and Engels, in a less psychoanalytic vein. 

These are all overly dramatic examples, the Real as negativity. Think then, also, of love. The emotional (nuclear!) desert that comes after a breakup, or a passion that overtakes you like a landslide; a love declared, as Juliet to her Romeo: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea / My love as deep.” Transformative and infinite love—divine? Yes, let us end with godly love: “the earthquake of the soul” in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the rapture experienced on the fifth ring of purgatory. In a place free of any physical alteration—for that is the natural law of purgatory—the causes of the earthquake are metaphysical: at last, the soul is free from the discipline of purgation. 

The metaphysical expressed in the physical. Our dramas sublimated linguistically into the Earth. Before the geological events in our lives, we can say—no, we can only utter—again with Shakespeare, like Banquo before the appearance and disappearance of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth: “The Earth hath bubbles, as the water has.”

In the afternoon of September 11, 2001, my older cousin and I were watching TV when breaking news from New York City interrupted our movie. A building called the World Trade Center was in flames. An airplane had crashed into the North Tower. The news anchor was repeating the timeline up until the collision, but I didn’t understand him. What was the WTC in NYC? What was the difference between NYC and NY? What was the difference between the USA, US, and EUA? Seventeen minutes later, an airplane flew into the South Tower. By then, my grandfather had sat next to us, holding a freshly made cup of tea. He asked us what was going on. My cousin replied that airplanes were crashing into buildings in America, and she burst into tears. I wanted to comfort her by trying to share her sadness. I frowned and looked harder at the buildings in flames, the crowds running in panic, the dense rings of smoke circling the towers, but all I could feel was indifference. An hour later, we watched as a flat rooftop with an antenna caved into itself. One of the towers was collapsing live, without audio. This gave me chills. I felt excited. A “bang” without a sound felt logical, deathly beautiful.

During the first few days, we woke up at dawn. The possibilities, the heat, and the humidity were overwhelming. One morning, the crockery began to rattle on the shelves. The clinking of glasses blended with the sound of passing trains, things shattering on the floor, a Tarkovsky soundtrack.

The subway? I turned towards the window. The walls swayed back and forth, like reeds. The landscape, the buildings, shifted from side to side, like a bad idea. There is no underground here! 

I looked at L., a statue, in a trance, his eyes shining. I began to feel overwhelmed by fear. We were half-naked, barefoot. L. wasn’t moving; I took him by the arm. Amidst the tremors, we went down the clean, bourgeois stairs, a place to die.

After a few seconds, the Earth, indifferent, stopped moving. Few people on the street, seven in the morning, buildings still in place.

Not quite sure what to do, we went back up to the apartment. I was due to start filming in a few days, and L. was going to record the sound. We should have put our shoes on; there was glass everywhere. I hugged him and felt his body, warm and stiff, unresponsive. “Earthquake,” said L., “Earthquake.” He turned to me and said, “More earthquakes.”

“I want earthquakes.”