The invitation is to have your feet on the ground while shopping in traditional stores. Because the head, for anyone passing through Santa Catarina, will be in heaven and in the installation of designer Madalena Martins, which, on this Thursday morning, is completely ready, having already aroused a lot of curiosity in recent days, when it was assembled. It is called “Ethereal Landscape” and intends to mark a welcome milestone for the commerce sector, after months of absence and without direct contact with the customer.
The objective of the Municipality of Porto is to arouse in the public the desire to enjoy a shopping experience in harmony, in a calm mantle, in one of the most distinctive shopping streets in the city.
Sky blue is the predominant color, as is the predominant blue of disposable masks that cover our expressions and make breathing difficult. But the color wants to be beyond that, it wants to be the sky that dances free above our heads, while calming the nervous red, accompanying the cheerful yellow, and combining with the serenity of other blues. A bipolarity of colors and movements that represents the tension we experience while taking us on an unobstructed journey, free thoughts that make us float along this flying carpet, in a ballet driven by the wind.
The action was born in connection with the “Lojas de Rua” initiative, which the Municipality has been promoting since 2016 with the aim of attracting people to the city’s shopping streets, combining animation and the dynamization of traditional commerce, with promotions from merchants.
This is not the first time that Madalena Martins, hired by the Porto City Council, has given an artistic body to the different municipal objectives in the decoration of the city. It is her artistic intervention that, in 2019, united the shops and buildings of Rua de Cedofeita with ribbons of various colors. During the Christmas season that year, the designer took the installation “Christmas is heat that is seen from within” to the Municipal Office, 17,000 meters of film from the waste of industrial graphic production, namely surplus from the printing of wine labels.
