Artist Alfonso Batalla created A Dolphin for Damien, inspired by Damien Hirst's now famous shark vitrine, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The dolphin piece is part of a series titled "Landscape Under Construction," with the goal of taking vacant spaces and filling them with life. It's just as much an exercise in architecture as it is in reading and re-appropriation.
In Batalla's words:
"The dolphin is just one of the many actors of my 'landscape under construction' series. In this work a new, ordinary, shiny element many times related to our childhood is digitally inserted in a powerful decaying architectural environment. This has something to do with hegel/heideger philosophical concepts. In a simple explication we, human beings, live usually in a 'being there' status. we are happy, or sad, with our jobs, properties, family...from time to time we feel a kind of distress, anguish, and we start to realize what we are. We might call this condition 'being oneself.'"
