It is the first time that a Unilever Series design is blocked off. But, it is also the first time, that a work shows how narrow-minded behaviours to the public are not always synonyms of failure. The object, we are talking about, names “ Sunflower Seeds”; It is a design by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (1957, Beijing), who has been called by the Tate Modern to create something new to put on the show among all the great exhibitions that each year, in conjunction with the Frieze Art Fair, open the Turbine Hall of the London Museum.

Sunflower Seeds are exactly one hundred thousand seeds of sunflowers pouring on the floor of Turbine Hall. They weight 150 tons and they came from China in white plastic sacks, the same that could contain pantyhose, tee-shorts, shoes, bags and many other things more. But, this time, they keep small seeds of ceramics, one by one painted by more than 100 families of the handcrafted district of the Chinese town of Jingdezhen. As they are on the ground, the landscape of seeds seem a mass, covering just a bit more than thousand squared meters of trampling surfaces. On Tuesday, October 12, just outside the museum, the ground floor was covered with a thin layer of white powder. A visitors team, as usual very heterogeneous, really enjoyed the show: children were laying and playing with the seeds as they play with the sea sand; crouched down teens were talking and gesturing while keeping the black and white grains in their hands; ladies standing against the wall and moving the seeds up and down with their naked feet, were looking at other people walking as they were in front of the TV.

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