The Glòries tower is open to the public. We are all holobionts

The Glòries Tower, open to the public from May 2022, offers a double artistic proposal signed by the artists Tomàs Saraceno, Maria Arnal and John Talabot.

After the Sagrada Família, probably the building most used to identify the silhouette of Barcelona is the Glòries Tower. This evocative vantage point of various metaphors is finally open to the public and offers a double artistic proposition. The most publicized is the viewpoint that includes a passable installation by the Argentine artist Tomàs Saraceno. Placed at a height of 125 meters, the piece offers some, let's say, exclusive views that show why Ildefons Cerdà considered Plaça de les Glòries the authentic center of the Catalan capital.

Impressive walkable installation by the artist Tomàs Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno's multisensory work invites you to play with the sensation of being suspended as if in a cloud or inside a large spider's web (one of the artist's leitmotifs). Climbing the installation allows you to connect with the freedom of the game; and it's funny how moving differently already makes you breathe and look differently... But these stripes are not meant to be a praise of Saraceno's much-quoted proposals, but rather to vindicate what the tower poses on the ground floor - 1.

The hypermirador has the signature of Maria Arnal and John Talabot

Below ground there is the hypermirador made up of four audiovisual installations and a piece of generative music signed by Maria Arnal and John Talabot . Here, art, technology and scientific popularization come together to explore Barcelona's urban metabolism. Because the city is not only about people, it is also about the thousands of organisms that live there, regardless of the material they are. The city is also the birds and wifi networks. The curator of the proposal is José Luis de Vicente , recently appointed director of the Barcelona Design Museum and a man truly fascinated by the climate emergency. If you listen to the podcasts he did with Maria Arnal during the pandemic and produced by the CCCB, you will see this.

Barcelona is a holobiont

So, listening to the heartbeat of the city with data and gusts of wind, it is impossible not to understand that the city is a network of interconnected guests, Barcelona is a holobiont! The first to use the word mythological reverberations was Lynn Margulis. The American microbiologist explained that a holobiont is the symbiosis between a host and several microorganisms, and that given the interconnection, one cannot ignore the other without jeopardizing its survival. Communities, towns and cities are already a bit of that, aren't they? Holobionts in constant transformation. And it is here that the message spreading on the -1 floor of the Glòries Tower becomes clean and clear. In the hypermirador, passive views are not valid and neither is anthropocentrism.