Creation process of The boy with a backpack
I came up with this idea in a subway station in Madrid in 1998, I saw a kid on the platform in front of me, more or less like this sculpture, and I thought about the difference of possibilities that between the kids of this era and of my generation, the end of a dictatorship and with few possibilities to travel or grow in freedom.
There and then an idea sprung in my mind to make a series of sculptures in which the different possibilities offered by life and situation to people were transmitted depending on their age and disposition, the either eating of the world or watching it happen.
This first sculpture captures a young man who wants to eat the world back in 1998 and with his backpack and inter-rail or metro multipass, he decides to go to a library, travel with Erasmus through Spain or the World, learn and train.
The idea was very clear and my nephew Juan Carlos Urrea agreed to serve as the model.
