Description of the project Luis Martínez Santa-María and Roger Sauquet Llonch
"I don’t want to change the world. I only want to express it”
More than one hundred used and discarded industrial drums have been de-painted, stripped and sprayed with water under pressure to remove the homogeneity of their surface finish and to deactivate their past. The result of its vertical superposition is a set of columns made up of cylindrical, scratched and irregular surfaces, on which the traces of mechanical tools and hand gestures are imprinted. Brands full of life to which we must add the contribution of atmospheric agents, humidity, rain, sun, which will improve the appearance of the drums by damaging them even more over time.
At the foot of Montjuic, the shadow on which each of these eight columns seem to rest on the ground would like to point out the insubstantial quality of these junk shafts. And it is that each column would like to claim for itself the least possible weight, to show that there is no weight in this regrouping of drums from different sources, of different colors about to dissolve forever and of trademarks that are blurred together, drum to drum, by means of coarse weld seams.
There has been talk of the verticality of the columns against which the horizontality of the German Pavilion was contrasted in 1929. But it was rather time, it was time that against which the pavilion was opposed, the silent time of the pavilion against the time of the ancient columns. With their evident ease, the eight columns of drums recreate that other time, a different time, which comes to be deposited together with the silent time, the silent place, of the admirable and luminous pavilion of Mies.
