Cakes at Dawn

There are several Portuguese bakery cult places, unknown to the general public, in most Portuguese towns, where hungry clients gather late into the night in search of a freshly baked cake. These cake factories sell directly to the street and are to be found in the most improbable places of Portuguese cities, attracting the most extraordinary “urban fauna”. We ventured into this world in a few cold winter nights, together with journalist Katya Delimbeuf, and photographer Hugo Teixeira, and met some of the bar hoppers, clubbers, night owls and other characters of this universe, and registered some of its environments, patrons and workers.

Hugo Teixeira

Hugo Teixeira grew up in the Luso-American community in San Jose, California. After 14 years living abroad in France, Portugal, Western China, and Macau, he returned to the United States to complete an MFA in the Photography and Related Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His artwork is inspired by magical realist literature and research about migration, expatriatism, displacement, and identity. He adopts a hybrid production approach which combines vernacular fabrication skills alongside various contemporary and historical photographic techniques. The resulting sculptures and collages exploit the semantic properties of his photographs, found images, and materials to best express the complex narratives of migrants and their descendants. As an artist and teacher, Hugo has exhibited work in the United States, Portugal, Slovakia and Macau.

Katya Delimbeuf

She graduated in Social and Cultural Communication at the Catholic University of Lisbon in 2001, started at Expresso that year and has remained there until today, namely in the newspaper’s magazine supplements (Revista, Vidas, Única and E). Abroad, she has written for Veja magazine and the Canadian newspaper National Post, having also worked on reporting with French television organisations, such as Canal Plus and TF1. She also collaborated extensively with travel magazines such as Blue Travel and Volta ao Mundo, which also led her to teach travel writing courses.