A World-Class Opera House in Spain Reopened With a Concert for Thousands of Potted Plants

Performers at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house are used to performing in front of important figures. But chances are none of the musicians who took the stage there on Monday had ever played in front of one quite like this. That’s because their performance was being taken in by a crowd made up entirely of potted plants.

The storied opera house reopened its doors with a performance by UceLi Quartet on Monday, according to CNN. But rather than playing to an audience filled with art-loving VIPs, the string quartet performed before a packed house of 2,292 plants.

Dreamt up by conceptual artist Eugenion Ampudia, “Concierto para el bioceno” was meant as a special way of marking the lifting of Spain’s coronavirus lockdown. As part of the concert, the quartet performed Puccini’s “Crisantemi” for the well-behaved, if disturbingly quiet, audience. The flora—which included palms, ficus trees and Swish cheese plants—were brought in from nurseries around the region and will now be donated to local healthcare workers “in recognition of their work.”

While no humans were present for the concert, anyone could watch from home via a livestream set up by the opera house. A reduced capacity crowd could have taken in the show, but organizers felt that a human-free performance was the right way to recognize what the venue and country have been through over the past few months.