Nobody's Looking — Distrito Angelus

01. A government office in a shopping mall

Ninguém Tá Olhando invents a bureaucracy: Distrito Angelus 5511º, an office where guardian angels stamp forms, file them, and watch over the humans assigned to them. For the launch, the job was to put that office where people already were — in a shopping mall, in a corridor they had to walk down anyway.

The corridor was taken as found. A signage wall was set across it, framed panels were run along its length, and the lighting was built to swing the whole passage between green and red. Nothing was fixed to the building. It went up in a night shift, stood for the run, and came down without a trace.

02. What it took

A mall corridor is a fire escape route before it is anything else. The wall had to stand free, carry its own lighting load, and leave the egress width intact; the whole assembly had to arrive through a service entrance and be reversible. The plan below marks where it sat.

03. The world it was promoting

The stills that close this page are from the series itself — the Angelus office, its desks, its archive, its machine room. They are here because the installation is a fragment of that world, and the fragment reads better next to the thing it came from.

04. Credits

Client: Netflix. Year: 2019. ALGAZAL//CO as execution partner.

05. Index of images

1. Netflix · 2019. The signage wall lit in red across the mall corridor.
2. Netflix · 2019. The green signage wall seen down the length of the corridor.
3. Netflix · 2019. The corridor in red, with framed panels along the wall.
4. Netflix · 2019. The installation seen from the mezzanine, green against red.
5. Netflix · 2019. The approach: blue wash on the ceiling, the green wall at the end.
6. Netflix · 2019. The mall corridor as found, before the installation.
7. Netflix · 2019. Floor plan: the installation's position in the corridor, marked in red.
8. Netflix · 2019. Still from the series: Distrito Angelus 5511º.
9. Netflix · 2019. Still from the series: the Angelus office, the desk on its dais.
10. Netflix · 2019. Still from the series: the office floor and its rows of desks.
11. Netflix · 2019. Still from the series: the archive corridor.
12. Netflix · 2019. Still from the series: the machine room.

Images 8–12 are stills from Ninguém Tá Olhando (Nobody's Looking), © Netflix, shown as context for what the installation was promoting. The installation itself is images 1–7.