Beyond Walls, Step 23: San Francisco 2026

In San Francisco, the artwork takes shape in the heart of downtown, at Yerba Buena Gardens — a unique crossroads located between the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and SFMOMA. This new ephemeral work extends the project’s reflection on what brings us together and what keeps us apart, in a city that has long stood as a beacon for American social movements and that today embodies, perhaps more than any other, the tensions between utopia and the fragility of our time.

Today, the city embodies a different kind of tension: that of a world in which technology promises to connect us more than ever, while at the same time creating new forms of distance. As the global epicenter of artificial intelligence, San Francisco has become a place where dizzying visions of the future are taking shape — to the point that the creators of these technologies have themselves publicly voiced concerns about what they are bringing into the world.

A city of bridges, it has also become a city of divides — between utopia and fragility, between inventing the future and remembering the struggles of the past.