Spanish urban artist SpY intervenes in the urban fabric of Lille, northern France, with Golden Monoliths, a public installation with a strong visual and symbolic impact. Fourteen shipping containers, ordinary elements of global commerce, are emptied of their original function and recontextualised as vertical columns covered entirely in gold, arranged along the city's main axis. The simple yet powerful gesture transforms an ordinary street into a ceremonial corridor, suggesting a new perception of urban space.

In this monumental temporary installation, the industrial object is sublimated, inviting the viewer to reflect on concepts of value, function and scale. Containers, symbols par excellence of contemporary logistics, are isolated from their operational context and reassigned to a contemplative role. Their golden coating enhances their abstraction, elevating them from mere transportation tools to totemic, almost sacred presences. The viewer is asked to question not only the physical impact of the intervention, but also its political and economic significance.

With Golden Monoliths, the artist continues his investigation into the invisible infrastructure that regulates the dynamics of the contemporary world: the circulation of goods, the symbolic value of objects, the aestheticisation of function. The container, usually anonymous and interchangeable, thus becomes a gilded fetish, a monument to an economy based on incessant mobility and induced desire.

The installation acts as a golden mirror in which the city is called upon to reflect itself: what do we celebrate when we monumentalise the industrial object? What value do we attribute to the form, and what to the covering?