Salvaged rubber tires get a surreal second life in Project Pneumàtic, a sculptural urban intervention from street artists Octavi Serra, Iago Buceta, and Mateu Targa. The installations were created by chopping up 40 used tires with a circular saw, and attaching the pieces to walls and sidewalks in a sequence that creates the illusion of sinking into the brown rock."The project is based on continuity and repetition," Serra tells The Creators Project. They experimented with different cuts and positions of tires, provided by the Ús Barcelona Street Art Festival, before settling on an arrangement inspired by the sequence of frames in film. "Once we started working, the visual effect that emerged from the tires caught our attention, since one could believe they were going beyond the formal limits of walls and urban architecture."
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The intervention differs from more traditional spray painted street art in that the tires physically occupy the walkways and buildings Barcelonés use every day. "People’s reactions varied widely," Serra continues. "From those who didn’t understand what they were seeing and why we were doing it and left the works with a mix of incredulity and indifference, to those kids who used our works as a an amusement park, playing and climbing on them."The beauty of Project Pneumàtic lies, for the trio, in the rebirth of discarded objects that had lost their function and commercial value, giving them purpose through art. To make this statement, they actually suffered quite a bit, Serra recounts. "Before finding the adequate tool and disks, we were breathing rubber powder for a few days… I guess this is the price of art."
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