What is the Red Ball?

RedBall Project, BarcelonaImagine strolling along a city street, turning a corner to walk down the subway steps you expect to find there, only to be confronted by a giant red ball blocking your path. It’s the surreal stuff of dreams, a segue down the highway of The Matrix, but here it is in the real world.

The RedBall Project began life as a public piece for Arts & Transit St Louis, which commissioned the artist Kurt Perschke. As an artist whose work encompasses video, sculpture, drawing, prints and public projects, Perschke is interested in architectural space, and how people inhabit space.

In the initial project, Perschke was offered three spaces for his work: two pretty parks, and a rather ugly bridge descending into the earth. He found himself drawn to the latter, to the sheer mass of the bridge and negative space beneath it – that which he terms the ‘armpit’ space. He wanted to show it smashing something, and whimsically drew a red ball beneath it. Suspecting it was ‘too easy’, he nevertheless showed it to the curator, who laughed, and they decided it was perfect.

RedBall Project, NorwichThe ball is 15 feet high, weighs 250 pounds with or without air, and is inflated in situ, a process which takes 40 minutes. There is only one red ball.

It was Perschke himself who spent his commission fee to take the red ball to Barcelona, where it captured the public’s imagination; people actively threw themselves at it, leaned, pushed, posed. The Project garnered a lot of media attention; then a curator in Sydney brought it to Australia. Since then it has crossed cultures as well as continents, from Taipei to Abu Dhabi.

He says, “people approach me on the street with excited suggestions about where to put it in their city. In that moment the person is not a spectator but a participant in the act of imagination. … That invitation to engage, to collectively imagine, is the true essence of the RedBall Project.”

RedBall Project, Abu DhabiRead more at The RedBall website, watch a video interview with Kurt Perschke and eyeball some galleries of cities the Project has toured.