Enlightened Universe Booklet

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October 24, 2015 Opening Ceremony at Rumsey
Playfield, Central Park, New York, USA. From left to
right: President of the General Assembly Mogens
Lykketoft, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, artist
Cristobal Gabarron, NYC Commissioner for
International Affairs Penny Abeywardena, NYC
Commissioner for Department of Parks and Recreation
Mitchell Silver, NY State Assemblyman Guillermo
Linares and President of the Gabarron Foundation Cris
Gabarron.
UN Photo Luis Rampelotto
Ban Ki-moon remarks
Unveiling of "Enlightened Universe". October 24, 2015.
Welcome to this celebration of United Nations Day!
The United Nations is 70 years old today. For seven
decades, the United Nations has served as a beacon
of hope for people the world over.
As we mark this milestone, we have the honour to
join in the unveiling of an installation, Enlightened
Universe, created by the renowned Spanish artist
Cristobal Gabarron.
This structure behind us depicts the great hope that
all of us have invested in the United Nations.
The 70 figures surrounding the globe represent the
7.3 billion humans living on Earth today. They also
represent the 70 years of the United Nations’ life.
Their hands are joined in solidarity, to show how
we create a more inclusive world. A world in where
we have shared values and a shared responsibility to
protect our planet.
I am grateful to Mr. Gabarron for creating this
masterpiece and for doing so on his own initiative.
His artistic talent is only matched by the generosity
of his spirit and his Foundation.
Thank you all for joining us on this beautiful
Saturday afternoon.
I hope you will leave believing that a better future is
within reach. Happy United Nations Day!
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Cristobal Gabarron’s Enlightened Universe by
Donald Kuspit
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Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the
founding of the United Nations, Cristobal Gabarron
has created a sculptural installation in which seventy
life-size figures, each representing one year in
which the United Nations has been in existence,
circle a globe representing Mother Earth, more
broadly and grandly, the cosmos. The small figures
dance like children around the huge globe, their
linked hands signaling their purposeful unity. One
is reminded of celebrants dancing around a
Maypole; the figures resonate with joie de vivre, as
their festive colors suggest. To use the sociologist
Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction, they form an
organic community rather than an anonymous
society. Two-dimensional silhouettes, their flatness
and abstractness indicate their modernist character.
Composed of fluid planes, variously shaped and
sized, they seem eccentrically cubist and covertly
surreal. The upright figures seem like mirages in a
desert. The work was in fact installed in the desertlike
space—a field of sand--of Central Park’s Rumsey
Playing Field, confirming its playfulness.
It is site-specific: the central globe echoes the shape
of the dome in the distance behind it as well as the
circular shape of the playing field. Circular
geometry is an aesthetic constant of the piece: the
figures form a continuously moving—suavely
forceful--curve. Each over-determined figure—at
once a symbol of a different year, different nation,
and different person—is a sort of petite perception
in a curvilinear continuum, grandly spiraling into
illimitable space. New figures can join the United
Nations, suggesting that it will last forever, and that
humanity will at last form a harmonious whole.
The idealism built into Gabarron’s masterpiece is
startling considering the reality of nations at odds—
to put it politely--with each other.
Seen in bright sunlight, the flat shadows of the
figures seem to bind them to the earth, even as their
lively colors raise them above it, turning to the sun
like the leaves of growing plants. Indeed, the
figures seem to grow before one’s eyes as their
colors catch the light, suggesting that human beings
thrive when they are in cordial relationship with
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each other—when they connect for the common
good. They do so when they enter the “sphere of
light”—the globe, existing in majestic isolation like
the life-giving sun. There is a mystical, even
Platonic element to Gabarron’s sculpture: it is
meant to lead us out of the cave of darkness into the
light of understanding—understanding of each
other, leading us to live and move together like the
“harmony of the spheres.” Gabarron’s globe has a
diameter of 6,371 millimeters, indicating that it is a
scaled down model of the earth, which has a radius
of 6,371 kilometers (3,949 miles), but it is also like
the sun, for its mirror surface emanates light in the
course of reflecting it.
The mirror is faceted into modular units, breaking
the light into nuanced fragments, intensifying and
concentrating perception. The sphere is subtly
minimalist—the systematically faceted surface is in
effect a gigantic grid--even as it is ingeniously
maximalist, for the light makes it seem larger than it
is, so that it all but completely overwhelms the
figures, implying that their lives depend on it.
Gabarron’s sculpture is an oddly open-ended
dialectic of aesthetic opposites: the geometric globe,
with its self-contradictory geometry, and the
gesture-like, expressionistic figures. It is a
contradiction in terms, an aesthetically sophisticated
paradox. The open-endedness of the piece
underscores the open-endedness of the perpetually
moving line of changing figures—figures can be
added, suggesting that the project of uniting nations
and people is ongoing and unfinished, that is,
incomplete, perhaps unavoidably incomplete: an
impossible however hopeful project. But then
Gabarron’s sculpture is interactive: the spectator is
invited to participate in it—to see himself or herself
reflected in some facet of the great mirror, and thus
be enlightened, however partially, and, above all, to
identify with the colorful figures and thus become,
however vicariously, one of them, another link in
the living chain of human being. With that, the
spectator completes the work—unites with it in
empathic engagement with the figures, and is thus
enlightened.
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Enlightened Universe at
Rotonde du Mont-Blanc,
Geneva, Switzerland, 2016.

Enlightened Universe at Gershwin Plain, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2017.
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Enlightened Universe
at Rond-point Schuman, Brussels, 2018
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October 25, 2018. Celebrating together United
Nations Day & 70th Anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights
From left to right: Angel Carro, Cris Gabarron,
Deborah Seward UNRIC Director in Brussels, Cristobal
Gabarron, Federica Mogherini Vice-President of the
European Commission / High Representative of the
Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Barbara
Pesce-Monteiro Director UN/UNDP Representaion
Office in Brussels, Beatriz Larrotcha Spanish
Ambassador in Belgium, Geoffroy Coomans Deputy
Mayor for Urban Planning and Heritage of the City of
Brussels, and Pierre Galand
UN Photo / Jorge Varas-Mardones.
Excerpt from the Message by Federica Mogherini
Vice-President of the European Commission / High
Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and
Security Policy
For us, the European Union, work with the United
Nations system, with all the agencies of the UN, is the
most natural one to do because we are based on the same
- not only values and principles which is very important -
but on the same philosophy which is that of cooperation.
The only way to prevent conflicts, crises and human
suffering is to cooperate together - to look for a common
ground even when it is difficult, to prevent, to work, not
only for peace and security, but also for human rights and
human development. This is the core DNA of both the
United Nations and the European Union.
the core, the heart of the European Union - but most of
all, because the globe is presented as a mirror. Looking at
the world, you see yourself.
I think that this is a very powerful appeal to individual
responsibility, because I often say the European Union is
what we make of it, but also the world is what we make
of it. It is up to us, each and every one of us, to have a
good picture in the composition of these triangles of
mirrors because these triangles of mirrors reflect our
own faces and it depends on us, on the approach we take,
if the global picture is a good one or not.
Our first, strongest partner is always the United Nations,
and I can tell you, you will always have in the European
Union the strongest partner ever because we know that
strengthening, also reforming the United Nations system
is the way forward for a better world, and this world
needs that dramatically.
Let me say why I am so grateful to Cristobal Gabarron
for this wonderful piece of art. Because I think that it not
only brings hope, color and diversity to this square that is
This joy in representing diversity and this appeal to
reflect a good face in the collective image of the world, I
think is something extremely powerful, and brings
together the UN and the European Union. Thank you
very much for, first of all, inviting us to celebrate
together this day and we take this as a reminder of how
important our common work is for our citizens, be it
next door, be it very far away, everywhere in the world,
from the Pacific Islands to the Arctic.
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Excerpt from the Message of Barbara Pesce-Monteiro
Director UN/UNDP Representation Office in Brussels
Together, as partners, the European Union and
United Nations jointly celebrated United Nations’
Day and the 70th anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights with the inauguration
of the art piece “Enlightened Universe”, created by
the renowned Spanish artist Cristobal Gabarron. As
the emotions that this monument brings forward
can attest, artists and culture have a fundamental
role to play in reminding us of our own humanity.
The 70 figures surrounding the globe, hand in hand,
represent the 7.5 billion humans living on Earth
today. Their hands joined in solidarity demonstrate
the importance of working together to create a
more inclusive world. A world in which we have a
shared responsibility to protect our planet. This
promise of a better future is outlined in the
internationally agreed Sustainable Development
Goals which apply to everyone and offer a positive
narrative for social, economic, and environmental
progress.
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