Wednesday, September 1

I woke to the extremely loud sound of thunder overhead at 4am. It rumbled on as it moved into distance and I fell back to sleep.

We set off after breakfast and spend all day in Serralves, the museum of modern art. It turns out that Serralves occupies a huge estate and has works on display both indoors and outside. We admire the huge Clas Oldenberg trowel standing in the grounds and the breathtaking treetop walk that includes a view of Ai Weiwei’s thirty metre sculpture of a tree in the Brazilian jungle.

We begin though with Terçolho, the big retrospective of work of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. I take this photograph halfway through the film loops, images, installations and sculptures. The catalogue tells me that their work ”is an experimental laboratory in which empirical knowledge, existential metaphysics and the boundaries of the perception of reality are questioned”.

I like it. It all adds up to something stupid in exactly the right ways.