The urban renewal project that is LXFactory, in Alcântara under the 25 de Abril Bridge, has been a growing hive of creativity for the better part of the last decade. Once a manufacturing and industrial site in the 19th century, it now hosts spaces for visual and performing arts, a large quirky bookstore called Ler Devagar (a separate post on this later), restaurants, galleries, designers, tech companies, entrepreneurs, retail, publishing, and other services in its 23,000 m² property.
With its large walls and network of artists, LXFactory is also prime real estate for street art. This post is dedicated to all the works I managed to photograph one afternoon in Lisbon last August, starting off with my favourite by Bordalo II. (Full album is here.)
Bordalo II
http://www.bordaloii.com/
Bordalo II is a local mixed media artist whose work with found objects is an expression of his views on modern life and its impact on the environment. From his About page:
“I was born in Lisbon, 1987. I belong to a generation that is extremely consumerist, materialist and greedy. With the production of things at its highest, the production of “waste” and unused objects is also at its highest. “Waste” is quoted because of its abstract definition: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. I create, recreate, assemble and develop ideas with end-of-life material and try to relate it to sustainability, ecological and social awareness.”
Desassossego (2012) by Mário Belém and Hugo Makarov
This is a large (40m) collaborative work for WOOL ON TOUR 1st Edition, combining artists from different backgrounds and techniques to create something together over the course of a week. Belém and Makarov titled theirs “Desassossego”, after a Fernando Pessoa poem upon which it is based.
“Inspired from an excerpt of the text, where a faceless crowd walks aimlessly in the woods, towards a cliff. The analogy with the political and economical situation that Portugal is living was too tempting us not to do anything inspired in it.”
More on the work at Google Arts & Culture.
Noty Aroz
Millo
Darts & Hearts (2015)
AddFuel
Other Works
Where possible, I’ve tried to label the works with artist information, especially in the ‘alt’ tags, but I’ll need some help identifying the rest of these. (Thanks to Tom Paul Maya for spotting Millo‘s work via Twitter.)
August 15, 2016
Album: Lisbon 2016
More Street Art In Portugal
See also my Porto Street Art board on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/gailatlarge/porto-street-art/
