STUBBORNS

Los Porfiados (The Stubborns) is inspired by the classic roly-poly wobbling toy known in Chile as “mono porfiado.” This installation comprises a landscape of fourteen inflatable, limber sculptures, some measuring up to seventeen feet tall, and invites visitors to interact with their pliable surfaces. The sculptures will come to life through human interaction and play, transforming the High’s Carroll Slater Sifly Piazza with collective movement that explores collaboration and the construction of public space. When activated, the sculptures become a living metaphor for resilience, understood not as rigidity, but as adaptability: the capacity to move with others, to be displaced and to return to balance. Each sculpture responds to individual action while also becoming part of a larger whole, created by accumulated gestures. In this way, the installation reflects how public space is not only designed but enacted and built through presence, interaction, and shared experience.