It’s the Ecostopy, Stopid.

On October 2nd 2010, the night of a concert by rock band U2 in Coimbra, the musicians of the Stop Shopping Mall performed a unique musical event at Casa da Música, in Porto. Ninety-one musicians, carriers of repertoires, styles and experiences as diverse as heavy metal, pop and folk music, rock, experimental, classical music and jazz, shared a stage in defense of the ecosystem in which they rehearse every day, and whose continuity is threatened by legal problems. However, and with this issue as a catalyst, they provided one of the most exciting musical events ever experienced in Porto. Spoken and visual testimonies all agree that everything expanded and changed from this point onwards – both for the Stop community and a significant part of the event’s spectators.

Regardless of the future of Stop Shopping Centre, the course of these 91 artists and others who were at Casa da Música cannot ignore what happened. That is, the course of music in Porto opened up a path.

However, the members of the press, even the shrewdest ones that announced this event in Porto, all went to Coimbra. In the future, anyone researching newspapers for the 3rd of October 2010 will ignore one event and report the other. The 9.998.000 Portuguese citizens who did not witness the Stop event at Casa da Música will continue to believe that the future lies in U2 @ Coimbra.

At times of economic crisis, when there is so much talk of developing and enhancing self-competence, innovation and the exportable assets, these options become fatal inconsistencies.

The relationship between the Stop Shopping Centre and the Futureplaces festival has been marking the recent years of community development at Stop. The events in 2008 and 2009 set the path to the 2nd of October 2010 event. Although the former were meant for a digital media festival, digital was never the essential instrument, as the mobilization and experience of these events were always cemented in a relationship that was biological rather than analogue – simply because this appeared to be the only possible relationship. However, today, if we want to reconstruct the recent history of Stop we will find it in digital bits, and the images that follow convey some of them. Currently, a site launched at the 2009 Futureplaces event begins to be a casual place for meeting and tuning in.

We work by goals. Supported by this online tool, our target for the coming year is to reduce the deficit of the Portuguese individuals who do not know Stop to the figure of 9,993,328.