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- Artists & Events
±MaisMenos± is a Portuguese art and activism project run by Miguel Januário (b. Porto, 1981), working in public space since 2005, when it began as academic research and then refused to stay there. It is less muralism than an argument conducted in the street: pared-down typography, road-sign vocabulary and municipal graphic language turned back on the city that produced it.
The work is characteristically economical — a single word, a symbol, a substituted letter — and characteristically pointed, dealing with economic precarity, property, and the distance between official language and lived conditions. It has run from the ± symbol appearing across Portuguese cities, through Grândola, Vila Moderna, to the Cumprir collective tile murals in Lisbon and Porto, whose panels were designed by members of the public.
At WOOL in 2014 the intervention played on the name of the town itself, cutting Covilhã down to covil — a den, a lair.
A collective tile mural near Rossio station, conceived by Miguel Januário and made from panels designed by members of the public alongside invited figures, each one answering what the Constitution and the values of April still ask of the country. The construction is the argument: a mass of individual tiles that only reads as a single image from a distance.
Good condition
The Porto half of Cumprir, beside Campanhã station — the same collective tile construction as its Lisbon twin, assembled from panels designed in open workshops.
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A ±MaisMenos± intervention for WOOL 2014 that cuts the name of the town down to covil — a den, a lair — a comment on a place hollowed out after its textile mills closed. Mural #10 on the WOOL trail.
Good condition
A one-word substitution performed on the most quoted line in modern Portuguese: Zeca Afonso's Grândola, Vila Morena — the song broadcast as the signal to begin the coup of 25 April 1974 — becomes Grândola, Vila Moderna. Characteristically ±MaisMenos±: the smallest possible edit, aimed at the distance between what was promised in 1974 and what modernity delivered.
Condition unknown
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