#abstract

The title apparently means the crater a volcano leaves behind. Why there's one sat in the middle of a square I couldn't work out — if anyone knows the story, I'd love it.

They say this was one of a set of three — a mural for people arriving by air, a pavement mosaic in the middle of town for those on foot, and a poster — all meant to welcome you to Barcelona. Apparently a ceramicist friend did the actual tilework.

You'll come across this sat out on the grass on the Promenade de l'Observatoire, close enough to lean on. From what I've read he wanted them outdoors on purpose — weather, sky, people climbing about — and pushed for that whenever he had a say in where one ended up.

The picture isn't painted on — it's laid into the brickwork itself, different bricks for the different bits, so it's as permanent as the wall. And the wall belongs to a neighbourhood library, which apparently got its own decoration rather than a poster.

From what I could find, the coloured strip is light-reflecting foil — even the photo's own caption calls it that — so it's supposed to change as the daylight does. It went up on an ordinary block of flats in Kaulsdorf: no plaque, no gallery, just there.

According to what I found, the blank ends of these prefab blocks got handed to artists as giant canvases — there was a whole programme of it in the East. Beyond that I couldn't dig up anything about this one in particular.