SARDINE MOBILE
SARDINE MOBILE was Moradavaga’s proposal for “Andar em Festa”, an open call promoted by EGEAC (Lisbon’s municipal Company of Equipment Management and Cultural Animation) to select five temporary artistic projects to incorporate the spaces of the metropolitan transport system during the city’s 2013 summer festivities.
The project was to be implemented in the Glória and Lavra funiculars, classified as National Monuments since 2002 and a living (and still working) memory of a golden era of mechanical engineering and transportation architecture that was the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth centuries.
The basic concept of SARDINE MOBILE was born from the unlikely intersection between the magic utopias of Jules Verne, the surrealistic graphic imaginary of The Beatles’ "We all live in a Yellow Submarine" and the sardine as a symbol of today’s Lisbon summer festivities. Thus, the latent narrative was a crossover between the aura of the "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", the pop extravaganza of "Yellow Submarine" and the aquatic symbolism of the sardines themselves.
What we proposed was to temporarily transform the funicular vehicles into a kind of moving interactive installations through the following devices:
- a set of periscopes through which passengers could visually interact with each other as well as between the interior and exterior of the cabin, providing different perspectives on each of the four vehicles;
- a "shoal" of about 40 "mirrored" sardines with different dimensions and arrangements in each SARDINE MOBILE enhancing the play of the periscopes’ reflections and creating the illusion of an aquarium tank in motion;
- a sound installation in each SARDINE MOBILE, reproducing sounds related to the maritime and fluvial environments (gulls, the gentle ripple of water, the sonar of a submarine ...) thus emphasizing the immersive quality of the experience.
Project Type: Competition Entry
Status: not selected for presentation
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Date: January 2013
