ORIOL RIUS, Plastic Artist - Barcelona

In Break Down The Walls, slender faceless figures made of lead break down the prefabricated walls that encircle Palestine.

Break down the walls arises from the impact that caused me the photo that is attached here. I was looking for pictures of several situations in which we build up walls to separate us from each other.

I cried when I saw these kids trying so hard to go to school through a slit in the wall that Israel has lifted. I remembered that recurring litany of the Psalms:

     Israel, Israel, you went away from your God again.

Hopefully, some day we will be able to see these kids with no walls in between, and without us dropping our heads in shame.

Break Down The Walls (concrete and lead, 68 x 95 x 62 cm, 2004) wants to be a stand against the walls that we are rising among us, humans, to preserve the differences, to exclude the ones we want to be strangers, to close ourselves into our glass bell.

This issue of the wall plays a central role not only in this work and its twin The Wall that I presented in Montcada, but in my everyday life. Because I feel very uncomfortable, from my western welfare, about the people as the Palestinian or, in another time the South African or German, that are destroyed by a wall that completely breaks their country and fields, families and landscapes.

Break Down The Walls, just like The Wall, wants to be a tribute to all who suffer and have suffered the brutality of a wall that breaks their everyday life. A wall that separates them from relatives and friends, and divides their country in two or more pieces.

   This is slight variant of Break Down The Walls (concrete and bronze, 125 x 145 x 145 cm, July 2005) that I presented at the Auditorium of Montcada. It is installed on the gardens of the hermitage of Reixac.

    

      I love this place because it breathes the same
    feeling that impelled me to make this work:
    an attitude of dissatisfaction and criticism
    to too well-off positions.