Sunday's Trouvailles #3
Grand artistic openings, inspiration from Japanese boutiques and upsetting AI news
This is Sunday’s Trouvailles, my Sunday morning newsletter, which is the online version of a favourite Parisian weekend activity - browsing a brocante, local market or garage sale in search of trouvailles (lucky finds). Each week, I’ll share the best of my cultural findings from the week and the archives, aka my piles of saved links, screenshots from my camera roll and paper treasures stashed in boxes.
Happy Sunday!
I have been in my writing cave, also known as my desk, working on what felt like an endless stream of reports for my main job the whole week, so this weekend is a chilled one at home. We have been adding some pieces and decorating our apartment here in Paris and I love seeing the paintings on the walls and small treasures collected from around the world on the bookshelves. They all feel like special trouvailles, as those in this week’s list.
🎨 Artistic trouvailles:
Grand openings - I love galleries and museums, and a city full of art was one of the many criteria for choosing a new city to move to in 2023. I also always save some time when I’m travelling to explore the local art scene. 2025 is a year of grand openings and reopenings, with several new museums around the world welcoming art lovers for the first time or new expansions and rehangings being revealed to the public. I already spotted two in Paris, Fondation Cartier and Palais de la Découverte!
After one year of delay, the São Paulo Museum of Art will finally open its new building this week on Friday, 28 March. I have been asking family in São Paulo to have a look at the construction this past year, but everything was kept quite under the radar until the last minute, as I suspect they didn’t want to promise another deadline they wouldn’t meet. I have this saved for my next trip to Brazil.
Ikebana inspiration - I have been reading my Japan guidebook and scrolling through videos as my friends and I plan our Easter trip and discovered Ikebana, the Japanese flower arranging practice. I recently found some cute abandoned small glass pots and wondered what to do with them, and this week I stumbled on this Japanese boutique on Instagram and this picture:
Let’s see if I’m able to recreate something half as beautiful!
📺 Trouvailles to watch:
Spanish 19th-century fun - When I was in Madrid, I was talking to my friend about Spanish TV shows and I came across this Netflix trailer for a new series launching this week, The Lady’s Companion (Manual para señorita), starring Nadia de Santiago from Cable Girls. She is such a good actress and this seems quite fun. Although, I’m always on the fence about a movie or show breaking the fourth wall (having the actors talking directly to viewers) - brilliant in Fleabag, just weird in the 2022 Persuasion adaptation.
📕 Trouvailles to read:
Bookclub reading - Tomorrow night I will be at
, a brilliant book club here in Paris centred around belonging, identity and immigration. I discovered it some years ago when I was still living in Rio de Janeiro with no idea I would move to Paris, which just shows how you can never really plan life too much. It’s hard to get a spot so be quick if you want to sign up!Today you will find me on the sofa finishing this month’s read, Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín. I found my copy on Vinted from someone in Ireland, which felt very apt. It’s one of my favourite movies but I had never read the book so it’s been great discovering the original work.
💭 Trouvailles to reflect on:
If you are interested in writing, publishing, AI and all the complications around it, you have probably come across this investigation on The Atlantic this week, revealing that Meta has pirated millions of books to train their AI. This is part of a wider investigation into LibGen, an illegal site with millions of pirated books, that AI companies have been accessing to steal content to train their AI tools.
We spoke about the environmental impact of using ChatGPT this week in the Long-distance Creative Club and stories like this extend the conversation to the wider ethical concerns. As a writer, thinking about the time, effort and creativity that goes into even just one single short newsletter like this one, I can only imagine how soul-destroying it must feel to find your book on the database. I read some posts about it by some of my favourite writers, including this poignant one by Daisy’s Substack:
Thank you to everyone who came to the first call of the Long-distance Creative Club this week! We had an incredibly productive session talking through how to set up as a micro-entrepreneur in France and it was amazing to hear everyone’s ideas for their businesses. I will share the replay this week and don’t forget to subscribe to join our next one!
Do you also feel each piece of decoration you put on as a stepping stone across the water?