In central Portugal, an art community makes this village alive.

1200m above sea level, 164 kilometres from Porto and 217 kilometres from Lisbon, in the Lousã mountains, a group of ceramists with various experience levels are feeding the wood-fired Sasukenei kiln built in 2015 by a group of Portuguese ceramists with the help of the master Masakazu Kusakabe. The process will take 36 hours to reach the desired temperature of 1,285°C and another 18 hours to cool down. Then, the students will be able to see their pieces; often it will be a surprise as this type of kiln creates an unexpected finish. For the time of firing the kiln, the group is split into teams of two, and each team works two-hour shifts. By the end of it, the teams are thoroughly swapping observations. "How was the temperature, how did it rise, do we need to put wood slower or faster, " told me Tatiana Simões, the Arts & Crafts School Manager. "They need to exchange this information because the kiln has pieces from all of them, and all of them have the responsibility to keep this fire under control."

A week later, when the ceramists finished their work, came back to their regular lives, and the kiln cooled down, I drove 10 km from the closest town on a crooked, narrow road and parked my car one spot away from an EV charging station. I was asking myself a question: What does practicing an art mean in a remote place like this? Villages, towns, and even whole areas far from metropolises are often conservative; projects that don’t fit in the general pattern often are criticised, especially those involved in arts. I thought about the anonymity that big cities offer and the freedom of expression that comes with it. Back in London I used to visit one of Damien Hirst's industrial-sized studios every few weeks; his assistants could overpopulate village like Cerdeira many times over. I've seen Ian Davenport's flooding his workshop with colour. I was alone in an ultra secured art storage with Van Gogh's painting, The Reaper, with the price tag between 12 and 16 million pounds. But I've never plunged in a forest that far from an irrational and buzzing art scene to learn about art.