Editor’s Picks: Daniel Soares’s Portrait of a Changing Lisbon

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Akshi Singh, In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner (2025)

In 1934, British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote a landmark text, A Life of One’s Own, in response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). Milner’s book raised a number of theoretical questions, including: How should we spend our time? And how can we understand our emotional desires? Almost a century later, Akshi Singh’s recently published In Defence of Leisure advances Milner’s arguments, suggesting that, in order to live life to the fullest, we need to make time for leisure, so we have the space in which to understand what it is that excites us at the purest level about being alive. These may seem like big questions but Singh’s accessible prose and intellectual prowess make this book an essential read. Singh is emotionally attuned to what leads us to a life of uncertainty and obligation and, through the work of Milner, as well other psychoanalytical influences, such as feminist theorist Jacqueline Rose, implores us to feel and think more deeply. I will be handing copies of this book to everyone I love this summer.

Daniel Soares, Bad for a Moment (2024)

Many cities around the world are facing a housing crisis: property speculation and tourism have priced out local residents, forcing them to move further away from their places of work as well as from their families and communities. Daniel Soares’s Bad for a Moment, which received a special mention in the short film category at Cannes in 2024, focuses on the complicity of those on the other side of the equation: town planners and architects compelled to make ethical decisions that could result in the displacement of people, histories and stories. Bad for a Moment’s protagonist, architect Adriano (played by João Villas Boas), battles his conscience as urban planners and property developers seek to demolish an apartment block, driving out the existing occupants – predominantly single mothers. What follows is a curious short meditation on the darkly farcical moments of millennial office life and team-building events, with beautiful cinematography animating the city of Lisbon, now increasingly home to digital nomads. While cities have always adapted and changed over time, Soares asks us to consider who is left behind – and at what cost.

London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984–1993, Vol. 1 (2020/25)

While scrolling through my Instagram feed a few weeks ago, I came across some grainy footage of Kingsland Road and Dalston Lane in east London, shot by a passenger in a moving car. These are both roads I walk along daily, yet the scenes depicted – bar Ray Walker’s famed Hackney Peace Carnival Mural (1983), next to what is now Dalston Curve Garden, and a passing 38 bus – were unfamiliar to me. The soundtrack to this footage, which featured a slogan imploring listeners to ‘Get your car tuned!’, is one of a selection of adverts and idents heard on London’s pirate radio stations between 1984 and 1993. What might seem like an unusual audio collection proves to be a time capsule from another era: there are adverts for hotlines to help ravers find love in the days before online dating and for nightclubs in Clapton with phone numbers to call if you had further enquiries. Compiled by record label Death Is Not the End (also the name of their NTS radio show), these idents and ads left me strangely wistful for another, more analogue version of the city that has been my home for a decade.

Akshi Singh's In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and available to purchase. Daniel Soares's Bad for a Moment is available to watch online on MUBI. Death Is Not the End's London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984–1993, Vol. 1 will be re-issued on cassette in June 2025.

_{Main image: Daniel Soares, Bad for a Moment, 2024, film still (detail). Courtesy: MUBI}