Photos courtesy of Shen Zhonghai/KDE.
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| Theme: “From the City of Our Parents to the City of Our Children” |
Design: Benedetta Tagliabue |
| Fabrication: Salvador Gilabert |
Size: 27,828 square feet |
| Client: State Society for International Exhibitions |
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Exterior Design: Celebrating the Chinese year of the tiger in 2010, Spain dressed its pavilion in the “skin” of the tiger. The steel frame of the 27,828-square-foot structure is clad in 8,524 handmade rattan-covered steel and glass panels whose brown, beige, and black colors create the impression of a colossal cat's hide. While sunlight filters through the waterproofed panels to dapple and warm the pavilion’s interior, the black and brown panels form the shapes of Chinese characters for words such as "sun" and "moon."
Pavilion Summary: Encompassing three exhibition halls conceived by a trio of the Iberian nation’s most famous filmmakers, Spain’s pavilion uses a mix of motion pictures, human actors, and robotic infants to tell the story of the last 40 years of the country’s history. In the first exhibition hall, a film by avant-garde painter/director Juan José Bigas Luna fuses images of children greeting visitors in Spanish and Chinese with live flamenco performances. Combining footage from film archives and more recent filmings in the second hall, Basilio Martin Patino communicates his nation’s culturally fragmented state by intentionally fragmenting the 7-minute-long movie’s look: 25 Barco CLM HD8s projectors flash scenes on five different-sized rectangular screens positioned irregularly around the hall, leaving guests with a vertiginous vision of modern Spain.
When visitors step inside third and last exhibition hall, they are greeted by Isabel Coixet’s 21-foot-tall baby. Named “Miguelín,” the robotic baby was conceived by Coixet and constructed in the United States at Chatsworth, CA-based Amalgamated Dynamics Inc., which also crafted cinematic creatures such as the monstrous bugs from “Starship Troopers." Among its repertoire of 32 gestures, the electronically animated Miguelín breathes, blinks, and "dreams” — via video installations running 10 animated films — of the cities that we will bequeath to future generations.
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