Spanish architect Fernando Menis proposes a series of installations of marine inspiration that recycle objects and material abandoned by the children and tourists in the hotels of the coastal towns of La Oliva and whose assembly involves its inhabitants.
Project description by Fernando Menis
La Oliva is a municipality in Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands, in Spain, which has been betting for decades on tourism. If so far it has done it following standard formulas, recently it is looking for the way to emphasize internationally through new attractors.
In this sense, the reference is the neighboring island, Lanzarote which, thanks to the interventions and works of the artist César Manrique, benefits from areas declared Cultural Heritage that make it a special tourist destination, unparalleled in the world. It is in this context that the current mayor of La Oliva commissioned Menis to design the Christmas lighting, with the following objectives:
• greater capacity to attract buyers and tourists since the viability of many neighborhood stores is based on the sales of the Christmas days;
• greater quality in the design and adaptation of the Christmas lighting to the culture of La Oliva, traditionally linked to the sea and fishing
• turn the area's Christmas lighting into an even more powerful focus of tourist attraction;
• propose new environments for Christmas lighting, such as the sea • create sustainable lighting in terms of energy savings and by using recycled materials.
Based on these premises, Menis proposed a design and a series of installations that recycle objects and material abandoned by children and tourists in the hotels of La Oliva as floats, surfboards, beach toys etc.
The Giant Squid
The giant squid mounts with the most popular items among tourists during the summer: colorful floats and sponge bars. This large piece will invade streets and squares, aspiring to become the symbol of the maritime Christmas of the neighbors of La Oliva. Each giant squid unit will consist of 10 floats, 20 hollow sponge bars and two plastic buckets, in addition to the necessary material for their attachment and anchoring. The designs and colors of these materials will be random and will depend on the samples stored by the City Hall and the hotels of the town. It will also have plastic beach cubes at the ends of the tentacles. The squid will be illuminated in two ways: on the one hand, a white light bulb inside the body, which will acquire different tones depending on the color of the floats and on the other, a series of colored dots along the tentacles, achieved with colored LED garlands. Inside the body there will be a protective substructure that will prevent contact between the light bulb and the floats.
Hibiscus Flowers
Fuerteventura, in winter as in summer is cheerfully colored, with warm temperatures and almost always sunny. For this reason, this lighting project shows that the real symbols of Christmas in Fuerteventura are not the snowflakes, typical of other latitudes, but the flowers that never close on this island paradise. Each of the flowers consists of 9 "bodysurf" boards - boards of various colors of lightweight rigid material, such as expanded polystyrene - adhesive plastic tape and the material necessary for their joining and anchoring.
Palm Trees
This installation is specially designed for urban spaces which, because of their importance and character, require a more sober, simple and elegant intervention. The palm trees are in this case the perfect resource, because of their importance within the Canarian symbology and because their unique forms make it possible to recreate an episode of fireworks, which illuminate the urban space. The novelty is in the orientation of the lights that do not surround the palm tree, but they run upright, from the trunk to the end of each palm. The design demands reducing the current illumination of the public spaces where it is placed, so that the lines of light that contour the palm trees acquire a greater protagonism. This gives the effect of explosions of light very similar to those produced in fireworks shows.
Little Boats
Although Corralejo and El Cotillo have got privileged promenades and views, when night comes these spaces are almost always facing a deep darkness. The sea cannot be not seen at night. Very simply decorated fishermen' boats that at night navigate near the coast, will illuminate the surface of the water. In this case, the installation must count on citizen' participation, volunteers being needed to offer their boats. Once the number of boats available to decorate is known, the City Council will hand over to its owners the lights garlands.
Jellyfish Garlands
Continuing with the motifs that celebrate the maritime Christmas of La Oliva, and always starting from the recycling of the most common objects, it is proposed to decorate the coastal walks of the coastal towns with a garland of colored lights that will serve as a base for the installation of a series of lanterns looking to reproduce the seabed. Although the initial idea is to dress these light bulbs with small jellyfish, it is also possible to allow the residents of La Oliva - and preferably, the smaller ones - to participate in this design by recycling and costumizing normal plastic bottles. To homogenize the surely different designs and give them a first homogeneous finish, it is proposed to apply as a first step a spray film of phosphorescent color - yellow, green, orange, pink - to the object, on which children will be able to decorate further with simple markers.
