benjaminwalksinlisbon

[benjaminwalksinlisbon]

I offer walks or tours around Lisbon, through the lens of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s massive accumulation of notes collected between 1927-1940 on nineteenth-century Paris. These walks are for anyone, however familiar or unfamiliar with Benjamin’s work, who is interested in exploring the city. Walks are tailored and work as an introduction to The Arcades Project but also a means to access the city outside the text – for those in Lisbon for a short time or for those who have been here a while.

The walks are organised around the interests of the walkers, however big the group, but places we could visit would be: the Águas Livres Aqueduct and Lisbon’s urban reservoirs, the port, the kiosks, the Jewish Cemetery, the Puppet/Marionette Museum, the botanical gardens, the museums, the churches, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (of which there is one fragment in the Arcades), the Santa Justa Lift, the German Embassy and the surrounding park, various shopping centres from an old arcade and the hyper post-modern Amoreiras Shopping Centre, and endless things in between.

Throughout the walks we can think and talk about a number of things: paving stones and pavements, iron construction, churches, the history of fire in the city, waste, Jugendstil, the weather, trees, trams, bridges, statues, fountains, aquariums, revolution(s), barricades, intoxicants, myths, stories, waterways, reservoirs, aqueducts, walking/strolling, construction/demolition, post-modernist architecture, malls/department stores, monuments, history of colonialism, signs of Hausmannisation in Lisbon, kiosks, social housing, asphalt/tarmac/macadam, gambling, fashion, history and historiography, the Metro, cinema, museums/the museum, the port/containers, graveyards/burial.

The PDF of The Arcades Project is here.

Prices depend on a number of things but please get in touch (samdolbear@googlemail.com) and we can discuss from there.

Sam Dolbear is a PhD student working on Walter Benjamin among others. He has published widely, on pedagogy, dreams, friendship and jellyfish. In 2017 he taught The Arcades Project at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa and is currently, with Hannah Proctor and Sophie Carapetian, co-editing a series of pamphlets on the text. He is also engaged in a long-term project to convert the text into a massive accumulation of audio files. 

[benjaminwalksinlisbon]