A striking new art installation is transforming one of the world's most celebrated architectural landmarks, turning visitors' perspectives literally upside down. Spanish architect and artist Xevi Bayona has created a powerful artistic intervention at the iconic Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, suspending more than twenty everyday household objects from the ceiling to create a haunting meditation on memory, domesticity, and loss.

The installation, titled "La Padrina and the belongings of domesticity," will remain on display through August 17th, 2025, offering visitors an entirely new way to experience the famous modernist structure. Rather than placing objects on the polished travertine floor as might be expected, Bayona has inverted the entire domestic scene, creating what he describes as a "floating domestic scene" that hovers above visitors' heads like ghostly echoes of a vanished life.

The suspended objects tell a deeply personal story. Each piece once belonged to Bayona's late aunt, Josefina Camó Valls, affectionately known as "la padrina" (the godmother). Born in 1927, around the same time that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich were designing the original pavilion, Pepi lived her entire life in Olot, a city in Spain. She never married, worked as an embroiderer, and spent decades quietly accumulating the belongings that now float above one of architecture's most austere and minimalist spaces.

Visitors to the pavilion now encounter an extraordinary sight: a bed, lamp, coat rack, table and chair set, and numerous other domestic items suspended from the ceiling, creating what Bayona calls "an aerial archive of presence and absence." The installation forms a horizontal band running along the entire length of the ceiling, establishing a visual and symbolic axis that divides sky from ground, memory from presence, and intimacy from abstraction.

This deliberate displacement creates a surreal reversal that challenges visitors to reconsider how spaces become inhabited and how ordinary objects can hold onto memory. By positioning his aunt's belongings above the pavilion's famous open floor plan, Bayona explores what kind of domesticity this iconic modernist space might possess, creating a dialogue between the personal and the monumental, the intimate and the institutional.

The project represents both a deeply personal memorial and an architecturally precise intervention. As Bayona's nephew and godson, the artist salvaged these items from Pepi's home after her death, relocating them from their original domestic context to one of the world's most famous architectural spaces. The contrast is deliberate and profound: the accumulated detritus of a single, quiet life suspended above a space designed to embody universal principles of modern living.

Bayona, whose broader artistic practice combines architecture with ephemeral installations and storytelling, sees the project as an exploration of life, death, and identity through the lens of overlooked belongings. The installation uses metaphor and contrast to examine how the objects we surround ourselves with become repositories of meaning, memory, and identity.

The timing of the installation adds another layer of meaning. Pepi's birth year of 1927 coincided almost exactly with the period when Mies van der Rohe was developing his revolutionary approach to modernist architecture. Her lifetime spanned the entire arc of 20th-century modernism, yet her life was lived in the intimate, domestic sphere that modernist architecture often sought to rationalize and streamline.

"La Padrina and the belongings of domesticity" is part of the Fundació Mies van der Rohe's ongoing program of contemporary interventions, which invites artists to create new works that dialogue with the historic pavilion. These projects typically challenge visitors to see the famous space in new ways, but few have created such a dramatic visual and conceptual transformation as Bayona's suspended domestic landscape.

The installation's impact extends beyond its immediate visual drama. By literally turning domesticity upside down, Bayona creates a powerful meditation on absence and presence, on the weight of memory and the lightness of objects freed from their earthly functions. The household items, once anchored to floors and walls in service of daily life, now float freely, transformed into sculptural elements that speak to loss, memory, and the persistence of the personal within architectural spaces designed for universal human experience.

Photographed by Adrià Goula, the installation creates striking visual compositions that emphasize both the familiar nature of the suspended objects and their profound displacement from normal context. The interplay between the pavilion's famous materials – its travertine floors, chrome columns, and glass walls – and the humble domestic objects above creates a dialogue between different scales of human experience and different approaches to design and living.

For visitors to the Barcelona Pavilion through August 2025, "La Padrina and the belongings of domesticity" offers an unprecedented opportunity to experience how contemporary art can transform our understanding of historic architecture, while honoring the quiet dignity of a single life lived fully within the domestic sphere.