"EL CONTRARI UNIT" is an intervention designed for the balcony overlooking the yard from classroom 139 in Escola Massana, Barcelona. It’s the project selected between other projects presented by the rest of the students of that class to be installed permanently in the building of the university. For the installation I collaborated with my classmates: Núria Juanbaro, Ada Coll, Marta Clemente, Zaida Nogales, Laia Martínez, Alba Garcia, Paola Fernándezand my teacher Élia Clemente.
This balcony is a "no place" in that building. Exists but is not used. It looks like an abandoned place. It is a space where no one is ever seen but in reality it is a very nice corner. Inside, both because of its constructive elements as because of the view to the whole yard, there is a range of quiet colors. It's a place founded in the middle of the yard and the school building.
Wanting to represent this idea of joining the yard with the building, the inside with the outside, and wanting to give back life and movement to the place, I thought of the following proposal:
Simplifying the form of the leaves of the trees in the yard to very geometrical shapes, we would finally apply them to plastic transparent material. We create a kind of mobile that we hang on the ceiling of the balcony.
Taking advantage of the broken windows of the balcony and the air entering the room we got gain that the piece acquires a dynamism. So also with the reflection of the glass, it gets attention and makes you look the balcony from the yard. Also thanks to the shapes and the colors of the pieces we get that union with the yard.
The final result gives an image where the inside is mixed with the outside. From outside it looks like the tree enters on the balcony and the same happens from the inside.
In this project there were no technical difficulties. The most important thing was to analyze that space and all its elements such as the colors, the smells, the light, the sounds, the materials, the textures, etc. The installation is way to provoke another way of looking and perceive the place as something special.