354kg, 118€
“The Porto’s Court of São João Novo ordered yesterday, X, to a prison sentence of four months on charges of receiving stolen goods, the only unlawful act proved in trial”; wrote, in november 2009, M. Claudia Monteiro in the Newspaper Notícias. As an urban tale remains the story that the alleged thieves withdrew energy – to power the equipment needed to shred the bronze sculpture – directly from one of the Clérigos Shopping abandoned stores. The female angel, created by the sculptor José Rodrigues, valued at 200 thousand euros, is the thread to the history of this square. Initially called Angel Square, as the legend tells that the wife of D. Afonso have fallen there from her donkey, and the king ordered that a chapel should be erected on the place. It was after an outdoor market and later, when Porto wanted to appear as a truly European city, that it became Lisbon Square and Clérigos Shopping.
In 2006, none of the refined stores remained open, the space being used only as access to the underground parking. And more specifically, in December 22nd, thieves, who were neither members of an international art trafficking network, nor bearing Zorro’s masks, decided to strike the final blow to a space dead at birth.
How many more similar spaces will arise in the city to fall, not under the thick cover of a great cataclysm such as Pompeii, but due to the rapid erosion of the negligent planning of our leaders?
Association of Friends of the Angel Square, Porto 2010.
see Troca-se por Arte, the organizors.
see Praça do Anjo I, 2007
see Praça do Anjo II, 2008
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