These Playful Sculptures At Atlanta’s High Museum Celebrate Resilience

It could be said that the High Museum of Art in Atlanta has a thing for the Spanish. For its almost annual outdoor installation series that launched in 2014, which is international in scope, three of the 9 design commissions so far have gone to Latin Americans or Spaniards (Esrawe + Cadena, Jaime Hayon, Tanya Aguiñiga). Now, there’s a fourth: Chilean studio gt2P, which specializes in public art and large-scale furniture—its Suple Connecting Form bench is permanently installed at the Design Museum, London—aimed at community building (“gt2P” stands for “great things to people”). And its High contribution, Los Porfiados (The Stubborns), an ensemble of monumental, interactive sculptures, is about resilience as well as connection. The 14 structures are composed of inflated vinyl anchored by a water-filled chamber, so that when pushed, they roll back and forth but never fall over. Their inspiration derives from two polar opposites: the classic wobbling toy known in Chile as mono porfiado—a freestanding punching bag in the U.S.—and Stonehenge. “They speak to our ability to evolve and desire to gather, to build collectively,” gt2P cofounder Guillermo Parada says of both the prehistoric U.K. landmark and Los Porfiados, “with their saturated pastels and gamelike quality, our structures—and resilience overall—become physical, playful, and collective, the pushing of them and subsequent joy enabling visitors to spend a beautiful moment with another, something we’re missing these days.”