The Portal.
On nostalgia, Latin music, and the small human details of a place
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A small gathering from the month.
Those We Remember or Are Yet to Meet
Chemu Ng'ok, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, 25 July – 19 September 2026
Ng'ok paints the community that is not quite visible: ancestors, elders, the not-yet-born; in vibrant, hazy assemblies that feel less like portraits than like the sensation of being held by people you cannot name. During the making of these works she wrote in her journal that painting is making fleeting moments real, anchoring them into a physical archive. In this issue, that phrase arrives with particular weight.
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The Order of Time
Book by Carlo Rovelli, 2017
Time does not flow the way we think it does. Rovelli, a physicist who writes like a poet, makes this strangeness feel not disorienting but consoling: if the past exists only in the traces it leaves behind, then memory is not a pale copy of what was. It is the substance of time itself.
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Mussel necklace
Estée Lauder, Aliage solid perfume locket, 1974
A silver-plated mussel shell on a chain, opening at its seam to reveal solid perfume within. You wear it at your throat and carry the scent on your body. The fragrance, Aliage, is green and slightly oceanic: the smell of somewhere coastal, of salt air and cut grass and something faintly mineral underneath. An object that is also a vessel that is also an act of memory, worn close to the pulse.
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Christiane Cegavske
filmmaker and analogue artist, Oregon
Cegavske spent twelve years making a single stop-motion film by hand: Blood Tea and Red String (2006), a dark feminist fable populated by puppets, crows, and dolls moving through a world of moss and candlelight. Every frame was made alone, in analogue, with no digital assistance. The result is something that could not have been planned: a fever dream that feels genuinely ancient, as though it had always existed and she had simply found it. Her practice spans across film, painting, puppetry, and doll-making, and inhabits the symbolic language of the feminine uncanny without irony or explanation.
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El Madrileño
Album, C. Tangana, 2021
An album about Madrid that never once feels like a postcard. Tangana moves through flamenco, bolero, cumbia, and rumba as languages rather than genres; the city's particular genius being that it absorbed the music of the entire Spanish-speaking world and made it its own without quite explaining how. Reflective nostalgia in sonic form.
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Volver
Pedro Almodóvar, 2006
Volver means to return. Almodóvar films kitchens and corridors and the backs of women's heads with the same attention he gives to faces. The dead come back. The past resurfaces. Penélope Cruz carries the whole weight of it with her hands.
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Sea Essence
Anchovy extract, El Capricho Salmŭria, Santoña, Spain
Twelve to eighteen months in salt barrels, Cantabrian anchovies pressed under weights until they yield an amber liquid: not sauce, not oil, but essence. Two ingredients: anchovy and salt. The result is what El Capricho calls liquid umami; what the Romans called garum; what a few drops in a vinaigrette, a pasta, a slow-cooked sauce will do to a dish that thought it was already finished. It disappears into food and makes everything taste more completely like itself. Used properly, it is invisible.
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Draw Me A Face Project
Buro Nōto, Pierre-Emmanuel Testard & Tiziana Raimondo, 2026
A Paris studio asked children to draw directly onto printed portraits. Makeup artist Tiziana Raimondo then translated those drawings — proportionally indifferent, chromatically fearless — onto living faces. What the children produced, without knowing what a face is supposed to look like, was more original than almost anything the beauty industry generates. Instinct as the oldest tradition.
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Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time (Volume V: The Captive/La Prisonnière), 1923
"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is."/"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
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