In February 2021, Gabriela Ruivo Trindade and Nuno Gomes Garcia, both Portuguese writers and emigrants, she in London, he in Paris, decided to pose a challenge to a number of fellow artists.

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"It’s a scary thought, but we have been living in this strange new era for a year now: a galloping pandemic, successive confinements, numerous fears, and ever worsening levels of isolation, inequality, and poverty. Our mental health degenerates, as if it wasn’t enough with the threat to the physical one.

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We thought it would be wonderful if we came together to mark the anniversary of this new age. Finding a common artistic goal, in these challenging times, can give us an unexpected boost. To witness writers, poets, illustrators, translators, photographers, from all kind of backgrounds - with the Portuguese language as common ground - contributing to a project that will prevail for posterity, which describes and features the (truly) historic moment we are currently living through, can have a remarkable impact. We consider it absolutely essential that we draw together the maps of confinement that each of us is experiencing, both on a physical and emotional level. Likewise, coming up with a manifesto against the disastrous policies, especially those designed to (un)support culture, that are spreading all over the world.

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Books, theatres, museums... ought to be regarded as essential goods. Cultural professionals have been completely abandoned and left to their own fate. Uniting through a common goal can surely turn into an act of resistance."