The Road to TAZ

Portugal, 2022
for Jude Regula

Jude’s Odyssey was delayed, as so many things were, by the Coronavirus Pandemic. He had filled out our questionnaire in 2019, hoping for an Odyssey in 2020. Two years later, after changing his name and his pronouns, and reexamining his way of life, Jude filled out a second questionnaire.  This new questionnaire spoke to a wish to find a new way of making community and a love of the mysterious lives people live in underground spaces. When he left ridden New York to meet us in Lisbon, it was this interest in the alternative worlds one must seek by traveling to underlands, to unmapped places, to hidden communities, that would drive the development of the Odyssey.

TAZ (pronounced tadj) is the Temporary Autonomous Zone. We are all, in some way, searching for TAZ because if we are searching for something, that’s what TAZ is. When Jude arrived in Lisbon he was already searching for TAZ, and the Odyssey was a journey of guides and signposts and fellow travelers. On his first night he showed Abraham his new tattoo, a tattoo of a bug that he had just gotten from a famous queer tattoo artist in the city. It was met by a menagerie of other tattoos by other queer tattoo artists from around the world. “My body is becoming a map of this community”, he reflected. He later discovered an old, beautiful book in his AirBnB library marked up with notes about play, mystery, and the search for TAZ. The next morning he encountered an Eastern European man beginning his journey to TAZ, a busker joyfully singing the song that had inspired the bug tattoo, and an Indian photographer desperately seeking the perfect photograph for his last three exposures. A grieving woman singing wistful Fado from her balcony offered him a train ticket to TAZ, and the city bloomed with signposts and a symbolic language legible only to those who had learned how to read it.

Jude’s encounters – in the city, on the train, hitchhiking in cars, and in the fields and cork forests of central Portugal – drew him into a community of searchers, each looking for their own understanding of TAZ. Though each knew it was a metaphor, a cypher for the life they wished to live, the community they wished to create, the artist they wished to be, they also knew they needed to seek the castle in the valley that could be found on no map but was as real as Lisbon or New York. More real, perhaps.  

Eventually, navigating by seeking thin places and the doorways opened by storytelling, Jude found his way to TAZ. There he discovered a community continually inventing itself, engaging beauty, believing in play. It was an emergent community, generated from the combined searching of everyone who had found their way there. TAZ, by definition, is temporary, and the next day it faded from the map and Jude ended his Odyssey back in the ordinary world, waiting at the airport for his plane back to New York.

Locations

Lisbon, Portugal, Gavião, Portugal, and many villages and roadsides in between.

Credits