Photo credits © Odile Decq
What is Diversity?
What does it mean when we are all diverse, all different?
In the Middle Ages it ment the “bizarre” and the divergent but today it means plurality – i.e. the contrary of being homogeneous, uniform, equal, monotone.
For 300 years, the Angels’ Square has been modified from a dense urban fabric to a clear, open, and standardized urban square – bordered with three different buildings, from asmall street scale to a large scale of an urban space.
During those long years, many people have been living around in the city. They all have known these small narrow streets.
We want to keep the memory of their venue on the place.
In parallel, today the space is a touristic large, clean urban space where many people from diverse nationalities are mixing.
We want to express their venue even for a short time.
300 black T-shirts are hanging, suspended on a cable structure over the square. Printed on the front side, are the faces of everyday people, while on the back are the faces of people in the past.
These T-shirts represent the traditional way of drying clothes on the balconies, as well as joyful pennants flying over the city squares for public celebrations.
These double faced T-shirts, by themselves, are expressing the time passing as well as the ultra diversity of people that has composed and still composes the city of Barcelona.
The density of the 300 T-shirts creates a kind of a canopy which provides shadows, and animated by the wind, their shadows will be dancing on the square as if peoples’ faces arelinking the past and the present by dancing together.