GONçALO TOCHA

Feira da Ladra, Jardim,
Lisboa 16.02.16, 14.30h

Gonçalo Tocha is 37 years old, a musician and movie director.

On 2005 he passes through a personal delicate situation: after the death of his mum, Gonçalo needs and wants to cut with everything;
with the past;
with the place he was born…
to transform himself as a person.
He decides to go back to Azores Archipelago, after 8 years not visiting it.
There he starts his movie, documenting the return to his mother’s origins and to the place of his more intense childhood memories. The place that represented a paradisiac escape, with a familiar relation.
Going to Azores he waits for something to happen that could help him in his process of liberation/transformation.
It is at this point that he meets a couple traveling and living on a boat, crossing the Atlantic every year, inviting him to join them in their way back to Portugal.
This is for Gonçalo the turning point.

8 days traveling, emptying the body physically and symbolically…
A starting point for a process of reconstruction, then of reorganization of a life, quitting a job, finishing his movie, spending for it all his money.

One of the navigation rules: traveling to arrive somewhere…avoiding the drift.

Balaou is Gonçalo’s first movie that changed his life.
Other movies followed.
Gonçalo went back to Azores, filming, living between the Archipelago and Lisbon.

He says he does not want to be a nomad, but he admits he would like not to live in any place.
He would like to have the possibility of working in different places, of being adopted by them and their inhabitants, creating, with the people he meets, new families.
The biggest treasure for Gonçalo is to feel finally to belong to a new community, a new Home!

He speaks about the false promises sold by the European Union and by the massive globalization process, the mirage of the possibility of traveling everywhere, belonging to everyplace visited.
Gonçalo does not believe in this vision at all.
An integration is possible he thinks, for example through work, but he also knows that this process is slow, hard, and requires dedication.

I ask Gonçalo what makes him feel at Home:
Feeling at home can be connected to basic things…as simple as going to a caffè and knowing what you want to order…

In this moment Gonçalo lives in a flat very close to the place where we meet: from his window he can listen the preparation for the Feira da Ladra, (a small typical market happening twice a week) the voices of the vendors preparing their stalls, the people gathering.
He has a big affection for the house where he is living now (and for the “feira” too): this is the flat where he has lived longest after the one where he grew up and it is here that he saw his family coming together, here where his first child was born.
Memories are impressed in every corner, making it difficult even if not impossible, to imagine, one day, to move to a new destination.
Gonçalo has a poetic way of explaining things.

We discuss the possibility of a life spent in the countryside and he explains to me his difficult connection with a static nature.

He prefers the active contemplation happening while working on things…he imagines himself closer to the ocean, the strong and mutable, never the same, the unpredictable power of it, going beyond the contemplation-…it is here, in this kind of confrontation that Gonçalo likes to live!

He defines Security as something we always need and as a search without end.

If some people are naturally secure, others can spend a lifetime in a different relation with it…in a dilemma between being too secure, or too insecure…a family can help in finding this security…even admitting that every thing is fragile…the important lesson to learn is to be able to decide! to decide even if the choice should then be revealed not to be the ideal one…this is the teaching coming from Gonçalo’s mother that I borrow to make it a little bit mine too…

How to manage to feel quiet, to reinvent the magic as in the first times of discoveries, to be creative, to regenerate ourselves without escaping, remembering that starting from zero with the passing of time is harder and harder…how to feel free in the unescapable slavery of our choices…

Gonçalo tries to follow what makes him feel good and lets him sleep without the feeling of contradicting himself!

...to listen is to imagine...

Thank you Gonçalo for your sincerity and for this precious conversation…meeting after long time…

Good listening!

SPACE:

This interview recording took place in Botto Machado garden, a beautiful small green spot that twice a week is surrounded by the colorful and lively "Feira da Ladra Market".

Voices and music were in the air, surrounding us with a pleasant cacophony.