Lídia Jorge: “In the June 10th speech, I had the feeling of a child who walked through a room and thought something had broken.”

Lídia Jorge welcomes us into the house where she was born, a farmhouse in Boliqueime, Algarve, where the walls hold memories of the living and the dead and where Ali Baba, her mother's 20-year-old cat, still roams. It's necessary to fight the erosion of a 100-year-old building, to repair the cracks. "Houses breathe," she tells us, as she leads us to a room where for years a map of Europe hung, with outdated borders. Now that the painting has moved, the irony of fate and the twists and turns of history have made the map up-to-date again. Things change. And Lídia Jorge is acutely aware of this, even as she searches the past for the roots of the future. That's where she looks, with the same hope with which her grandfather built a chimney too large for the house he could build, certain that one day it would grow. It was with this hope that she wrote the June 10th speech, never imagining that it could become a national controversy. It was when she heard boos and applause that she realized that perhaps her words had broken something. And that moved her.

What is your oldest memory?