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Andén
Client
Pasajes arts programme
Year
2024
Role
Design and painting
Team
Paloma and five painters, nine nights
Forty metres of grey tile, sixty thousand people a day, and a commute nobody enjoys. The brief was to make the passage feel like the start of a trip, not the end of one.
The ask
The city’s public art programme had one wall, nine nights of access after the last train and a budget for paint, not scaffolding. The mural had to read at walking speed, from both directions.
What I made
One long green river of travellers, plants and animals carrying their luggage, drawn as a single continuous line so it reads left to right and right to left. We painted it in silicate paint with masking tape and a projector, and I hid a small hand-lettered “you are here” every ten metres.
How it landed
It opened in March 2024. Station staff clean it every month, which is how you know people like it, and commuters now say they will meet “at the one with the tortoise”.
“People stopped wearing headphones in that passage. They walk slower and look up.”
Mónica Reyes
Curator, Pasajes public art programme