From Marquês to Rua do Monte Cativo

Abstract

This visual essay is largely based on the images and writings the author sampled in the streets of Porto (Portugal) during a walk from Marquês subway station to Rua do Monte Cativo, and later translated from Portuguese into English. The work is part of a larger creative research project PORTOSCRIPT, focussing on the development of experimental ideas based on the linguistic landscape studies of the area. The essay aims to blend the voices of many narrators into a single, unified, subjectively objective experience, where small details add up to a larger picture, constituting an entry point to an enhanced, semi-fictional and hypertextual reality where meanings mix, meld together and change.

The form of an essay was chosen to further experiment with blending newly written text, translated text taken from images, photographic images, painted images within photographic images and the hybrid types of perceptual experience and associations the final image-text may create. Based on the author’s interest in Street Art and Graffiti as a manifest form of collective consciousness, and an imprint of a certain era and mindset on the surrounding architectural structures, as well, this work aims to capture the depth of a fleeting moment in time.