The history of Matosinhos
Matosinhos is a coastal municipality near Porto, settled since Paleolithic and Mesolithic times and anchored by an Iron Age hillfort. Granted its own municipal standing from 1514, it later gathered forts, a wine house turned architecture centre, and a seafront square holding a modern net sculpture.
Praça Cidade Salvador in Matosinhos sits near She Changes, a giant net sculpture by Janet Echelman nicknamed "anémona." Raised in 2005 as her first permanent public artwork, it hangs a tilted 45-metre steel ring strung with a 36-section woven net, taken down for repairs in 2020 and reinstalled by April 2021.
A giant woven anemone rises over the square
About 300 feet from here stands She Changes, a giant net sculpture known locally as "anémona," the anemone. Janet Echelman designed it for Porto and Matosinhos together, and it was her first permanent public artwork.
Three steel poles hold up a 20-ton steel ring, 45 meters across, tilted toward the ground. A woven net hangs from the ring, stitched from 36 sections of different colors and densities. The poles are painted to look like the smokestacks and lighthouses along this coast. The net itself nods to the area's old fishing industry.
In October 2020, workers took the whole net down for repairs. They rebuilt it with new material and put it back up by April 2021. The finished sculpture weighs about 1.5 tons, light enough to move in the sea wind above the square.
The net wins awards and earns a local name
The net is made of Tenara, a fiber related to Teflon that shrugs off salt air and sun. That choice matters here, 300 feet from the Atlantic, where wind off the water would shred ordinary fabric in a few seasons.
The work won notice fast. In 2005, Americans for the Arts named it one of the year's best public artworks. A year later, the Advanced Textiles Association gave it an award for architectural structures, recognizing the engineering behind the net as much as its look.
Locals settled on their own name for it early: anémona, the anemone, after the way the net seems to drift and pulse like a sea creature caught mid-current. The nickname stuck harder than the artwork's official title ever did.
Today the sculpture still hangs over the square, changing color and shape as the wind moves through it and the light shifts through the day. It draws walkers off the coastal path just to stand underneath and look up.
The net still hangs over the square, shifting with the sea wind.
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