LIMO MALOBEO
Meaning the disobedience of boundaries in Esperanto, Limo Malobeo is a twofold spatial intervention that takes the opportunity to design the grounds of the festival A Porta 2021 to question the public/private nature of an underused space in central Leiria. The garden of Vila Portela was recently made public while, however, remaining locked away from the citizens of Leiria and its discussions on the uses of the city.
Borne of a long process of interviews and queries with the population, the project started from the fantastic imaginaries developed about the future of this space. Assuming the need for a public appropriation of Vila Portela, the project questions the public/private limits of this space, by proposing two key moments of conflict and interaction between those two states.
These two key moments are, on the one hand, the garden’s enclosed relationship with the orchard and field close by, trapped in metal grid wire, and on the other, its overlooking position over the city. In the first, we proposed a voley court, executed in the same metal grid wire that traps the garden in a private compound. The intervention sought to transform interdiction in a plaything of transgression, activated by the actual use of the court, which forced one to question the rigidity and meaning of the divide between garden and field.
In the second moment we proposed a lookout/bell tower over the city. Conceived as an in-between space, this sought to confront the public relationship between Vila Portela and the street. On the one hand it constituted a new vantage point from which to perceive the city, on the other, it invited a direct interaction with the street at the property’s limit, through a bell mechanism that could be activated by both sides.
Both installations were conceived as spontaneous objects that may endure, as well as disappear from one day to the next. As such, both take up the re-use of found objects and materials, as well as from the whole use of new materials, without cuts and strains, supplied by the festival.
The lookout/bell tower was developed exclusively by joining materials with belts and joints, excluding the use of screws, nails or any other form of invasive fixation.
As the name itself suggests, each installation tried to transgress the limits of what we take for ephemeral and lasting, informal and formal, public and private. It was itself a search for ambiguity emerging from an exploratory construction process that tried to invade, almost illegally, the old estate of Vila Portela.
Type of Project: Instalation
Place: Vila Portela, Leiria
Date: June/July 2021
Duration: 2 weeks
Umbrella Project: Festival A Porta
Promoter: Associação Flamingo Imbatível
Design and Construction: Colectivo Til
Photography: Colectivo Til, Idalécio Francisco.