This yearly page is now almost 'traditional'. As in the preceding years, there was an exhibition of sand sculptures in Berlin. (The pictures of the preceding exhibitions can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
In 2010 the exhibition had returned to the place where it started in 2003 (or, at least, just across the street from there).
The exhibition had become a bit dull in the preceding years. Many of the sculptures seemed like an arbitrary collection of 'meaningful symbols', which seemed to express some deep, but generalized meaning, but lacked any clear idea. A bit like a 'fortune cookie wisdom' - never exactly wrong, but kind of bland.
There were examples of this in this year's presentation. Such as a sculpture that shows a giant eye, ear and mouth. The description next to it mentions that "those who speak the truth get smashed to pieces".
Well, even ignoring the triteness of the statement, it seems that, unlike the proverbial picture being worth a thousand words, the sculpture is worth about nine words. And the nine words convey the idea more clearly. (For example, nothing in the statue hints at 'speaking the truth'.)
But this year, there some statues were a bit more playful again, so maybe there is a trend to more lightness. For example, one statue looked just like an oddly shaped blob, but from certain points of view, the edge looked like a human profile.
There was also the return to one big collaborative work (which had been missing the previous year), which had three bored people sitting on a pile of TV screens. While the message (presumably that TV makes you lazy) was a bit forced, it had lots of details and individual touches and was just fun to walk around, look at and try to make out references.
I was also fairly lucky with the timing this year. I was visiting while the football world championship was on and there was an 'important' game at that time. So most people were sitting in front of their TVs. So for more than an hour, there were only two visitors to the whole exhibition, which allowed nice, unobstructed viewing and photography on a fine, sunny Saturday afternoon.
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