This project was bookended by the election of Donald Trump, in whose rhetoric the wall is both a real and an imaginary device of xenophobia. Trump’s “wall” trades primarily on its role in division and exclusion—it is a representation and embodiment of intolerance. This gives walls an unduly bad rap. Blow Up the Wall! intends to expand, or rather inflate, the ways the walls of MoMA PS1 are imagined.

In Blow Up the Wall!, the concrete walls of the courtyard become the support, the ground, and the horizon of the project. Large inflatable figural intrusions hang over its edge, breaking lines, rivaling the multiple scales of the courtyard, and creating spaces in which to gather, tarry, and find refuge. Rocking benches pump up the inflated hanging figures and then immediately launch off the faces of the wall. A streaking mixture of pink, white, and yellow sand continuously roils at their base. Blow Up the Wall! is an urban garden with native creatures in a parallel nature.