An occasional wrapped monument

Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff), dead in 2020 and Jeanne-Claude, proposed in 1975, dead in 2009, one of their interventions on the Monument to the Colon of Barcelona. As they point out on their website, “All the unfinished projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude failed because permission was denied with one exception, the Monument wrapped in Christopher Columbus, Barcelona Project, which began in 1975. Having received two denials, permission was granted by Pasqual Maragall, the mayor of Barcelona, in 1984″.

But the idea of a wrapped Monument was no longer at the heart of the artists and Christo and Jeanne-Claude decided not to complete the project.

Forty-five years later, a “wrapped monument” appears in Barcelona. Due to the construction works of a collector in Diagonal avenue, between Girona street and Paseo de Sant Joan.

The huge eyes show the surprise of the owl that was once an advertisement for Rótulos Roura, an outdoor communication company in Barcelona, which was saved from the picket line by being considered a relevant element of the city’s urban landscape, when it saw the Monument to Jacint Verdaguer, one of the national poets of Catalonia, wrapped in white cloth, in  Christo’s way. It is not an artistic intervention; it is an intervention to “protect” the monument from the works.

The project for this monument dates from 1912, but its construction was not completed until 1924. Jose M. Pericas was the author of the architectural project and the sculptures were in charge of Joan Borrell i Nicolau and the Oslé brothers, Llucià and Miquel Oslé.

Popularly the monument is known with the nicknames The Raven or The Candlestick