Fora de lloc. Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes: recorregut, gest, objecte
Sculpture exhibition featuring seven sculptures, an audio-visual and a series of photographs.

Machinery: three pieces of white ceramic and wooden structures
Ensorrat: sand and silicon fabric
Palmerar: nine tubes of yellow foam and super-absorbent cloths
Deixar-se emportar: steel sheet, two steel tubes and four props
Calaix de l’ànima: several types of bricks
Perdre’s: five hundred cement slabs, in three different shades of grey
Gestures: audio-visual

A publication was also issued
35 copies

Description of the work
The publication's text is presented below:

THE PLACE
The square is halfway between the Juan Manuel Zafra school and the Museu del Disseny. Some of the students had strong links to the square, being life-long residents of that neighbourhood. They often passed it to get to the shopping centre, the beach or Poblenou. Many of them even remembered what it was like before the public works there. Others, however, had only recently come to live in the neighbourhood or lived far away and had therefore only known the square undergoing remodelling work.

THE JOURNEY
We visited the square undergoing remodelling work one morning last February, with disposable film cameras, and we walked around taking photos of the features that caught our attention. Looking at the public works, we were able to discover material in various states: still formless in some parts — in sacks, piled up, damp, in the process of being turned into something else — and, in other parts, already transformed into the features that we recognised from the public space we inhabit in our everyday lives. At that time, the square was undergoing constant change: everything that happened that day would no longer happen again, and the following day, what had interested us no longer existed and had been turned into something else. Once the photographs were developed, we wrote some texts (brief fictions, recollections and images) on the thoughts we had had during our walk.

Place + gesture + object

THE GESTURE
Each sculpture came about from relating the square’s building-work materials to everyday objects — which we were able to find at the Museu del Disseny — and which invited us to make a particular movement with the body, for example picking up, striking, collecting, turning, stretching, resting or throwing away. In other words, it was through household objects with which we establish a quick link, a habitual movement of the body and therefore a known experience, that we worked on the square’s materials to explain our experience that day.

THE MATERIAL
So as to feel closer to the materials of Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, we used them to make our pieces in the same way that they were normally used in construction but, in this case, on a small scale and in relation to our bodies. Perdre’s, for example, is a carpet made with the same slabs that the square’s paving has been built from; Calaix de l’ànima was built from bricks and cement like a real building, and Deixar-se emportar was made with the same steel sheets and the very props used for making moulds for cementing the ground. Our interaction with this material was a way of giving them warmth, proximity and an everyday quality. So, our hands helped us to understand how the city we lived in was built.

Presentation
The exhibition was presented on Thursday, 24 May at 7 pm at the Museu de Disseny. The students and the creator explained the work process and the various interventions.

The presentation was attended by friends, family members, teachers and representatives from the ICUB, the Barcelona Education Consortium and people from the world of culture. Pilar Vélez, the museum’s director, introduced the presentation.