Until 23 July, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe has set up in the Barcelona Pavilion of Mies van der Rohe the installation “The Cost of Money: Raft”, by multipotential designer Mark Cottle. “The Cost of Money” is a continuing art project, which began in the Richard Neutra VDL House in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, in 2019, with the aim of starting a reflection within some of the most important works of modernist architecture, with regard to the “the steep human price capital exacts, in particular from the most vulnerable populations, and at enormous expense to the environment”.

This is the second location that houses the work of Cottle and here “Raft” takes the form of two large carpets, about 13x6 meters, composed of almost 10,000 plastic bags of different colors, selected and recovered by the artist from the garbage cans of Barcelona. A carpet is located inside the Pavilion and surrounds the famous onyx wall; the other was placed outside, on the water of the pool, as a kind of large floating plastic raft. Each bag is a symbol of “single-use culture” and implies a transaction, the tangible residue of consumed goods, and only sometimes reused.

“The Pavilion [is] a place that represents a moment in which industry was seen as a necessary tool towards the future, but which already had a high social cost,” explained Mark Cottle explains, who for this reason wanted to relate this iconic space with the socio-economic mechanisms that have led us to the current environmental crisis.