Where is our south? Locating new imaginative geographies in creative alliances between musicians from Portugal and the Arab world

Reflections on Portuguese orientalism have traditionally focused on the ways past historiographies of an academic penchant conveyed representations of "Arabs" and of their presence in explanatory theses about the Portuguese nation. This article focuses on how these kinds of statements form discursive archives which are handled within processes of subjective identification and acquire meaning in products and creative processes of expressive culture. Focusing on a musical collaboration between a Portuguese and a Lebanese musician, this seeks to understand how particular "imaginative geographies" emerging through sound, poetry and expressive practices dialogue with the current European economic and political context, in particular, the Portuguese.