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Paper short abstract

Presenting clips from a two-screen video installation that utilizes material from a multimodal ethnography in Lisbon, we hear stories of newcomers to the city as they attempt to find their footing in a place undergoing immense socio-cultural change, and that is urging circulation over settlement.

Paper long abstract

Since the 2011 Troika intervention, Portugal has seen an influx of new residents spurred by a relatively lax immigration policy, tax incentives and a low cost of living compared with the rest of Europe, shifting Portugal’s paradigm from a country of emigration to an immigration destination.

The “floating city” of Lisbon is situated at a point – geographically and socio-economically – that blurs the boundary between the global South and North; a transitory space marked by the rapid movement of people and things from a diverse range of backgrounds. While all in Lisboa must now play in the field of Bauman’s liquid modernity – with locals and newcomers trying to establish a livelihood in the city that they’d like to call home, while trying to understand what that home actually is – there is a pervasive and growing sentiment that the city should belong to some and not others, and a reconfiguration (with eyes towards the past) of what it is to be Portuguese.

Presenting clips from a two-screen video installation that utilizes material from a three-year multimodal ethnography, we encounter the trajectories of newcomers to Lisboa as they reckon with a city undergoing immense change; uncovering how sensory-affective-embodied modes are implicated in the navigation of frictions and opportunities in a new lifeworld for people on the move, disentangling the divisions between “local” and “global”, “us” and “them”, and “belonging” and “estrangement” in the lives of the interlocutors, and complicating polarized media and political rhetoric with regard to migration.