Just Odd

The Balanced Box, Barcelona, 2018

Lots of touristic passersby photograph this particular wall (above, and behind the box) with its 19 different, apparently random, objects glued thereon. If you pay attention, you’ll find the unusual urban art “exhibit” near the beach in the colorful Barceloneta section of Barcelona. 

But…who thought it was a good idea to leave the giant cardboard container up there? What arrived in the box? What might still be in the box? A severed hand?

Brief backstory…

The wall behind the box was a 2011 project involving a large number of kids from some 26 schools in the area. The idea was to decorate what was up until then a monsterous eyesore of concrete. The 19 objects they came up with, built, then pasted there are all related to the story, “El principio de la sabiduria” by Pere Calders–which, interestingly, begins with the finding of a human hand (the left one, to be morbidly precise) by a rich man’s gardener.

Having read the story, I would assume the objects, then, are items that the school kids imagined might have been lost–and then found–in the rich man’s garden, much like the hand was. (You have to read it to get it.)

Yep. Kids mixing it up with art, literature, and culture in general…it is definitely a consistent trend here in Barcelona, the city of 100+ museums.