Public sculpture that invites use is rare, and public sculpture that invites skateboarding is rarer still — skateparks and sculpture usually meet in the form of skate-deterrent studs bolted onto a plinth.
XPOME, a Bulgarian graffiti artist, was invited to make a sculpture for an ongoing exhibition on Bulgaria’s skateboarding history at the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center in Gabrovo. Instead of an artwork about skateboarding, he built something to skate.
The piece
Five letters in concrete and steel spelling XPOME, positioned in front of the Center’s old building. Each letter is a distinct obstacle:
| Letter | Obstacle |
|---|---|
| X | a double quarter pipe |
| P | a rail around a concrete island |
| O | ”the first volcano ever built in Bulgaria” |
| M | a grinding bench |
| E | a triple jumping platform |
It functions as an actual mini skatepark, not a sculpture of one.
Why letterforms and skate obstacles fit together
This is a better pairing than it first appears, and the reason is that both are vocabularies of named forms.
Skate architecture has a precise lexicon — quarter pipe, bank, ledge, rail, hubba, pyramid, bowl, spine, volcano — and each name denotes a specific geometry that affords a specific set of tricks. A skater reads a plaza the way a typographer reads a page: as a set of known forms in an arrangement.
Letterforms are the same kind of object. An X is two intersecting diagonals, which is already two banks meeting — a double quarter pipe is close to the literal translation. An O is a closed curve, which is a bowl or, as here, a volcano. An M has two verticals and a trough, which is a bench. An E is three horizontal arms at different heights, which is a stepped platform.
So the design is not letters with skate features added. It is a recognition that the two vocabularies overlap, and that a tag rendered at architectural scale in concrete is nearly a skatepark already. That is a genuinely elegant observation and the piece earns it by being skateable rather than merely suggestive.
And graffiti and skateboarding share a history, which is what makes the authorship right. Both are practices of reading the city for affordances the city did not intend — a wall as a surface, a handrail as a ledge, a loading bay as a bank. XPOME’s own name, made into obstacles, is that reading turned inside out: instead of appropriating architecture, the architecture is the appropriation.
The site is doing work too
Gabrovo is Christo’s birthplace. Christo Vladimirov Javacheff was born there in 1935, and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center is the town’s institution dedicated to him.
Putting a functioning skatepark in front of it is a pointed and affectionate gesture. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work was monumental, temporary, enormously expensive, and emphatically not to be touched — Wrapped Reichstag, The Gates, Surrounded Islands, all of it to be walked past and photographed and then removed. Their stated position was that the work carried no message and existed only to be experienced.
XPOME’s piece is monumental, permanent, cheap by comparison, and exists to be used — scuffed, waxed, chipped, and improved by wear. A skate object acquires its character from damage.
That is not a criticism of Christo, and the piece does not read as one. It is a different proposition about what public art in that town can be, placed where the comparison is unavoidable.
The practical note for anyone proposing this
Skateable public sculpture is a maintenance and liability conversation before it is an artistic one. Concrete needs the right finish — too rough and it is unskateable, too smooth and it is dangerous wet. Steel coping needs to be properly set and flush. Transitions need correct radii or the obstacle is unusable and nobody will tell you politely.
The people to design it with are skaters and a skatepark builder, and the successful examples — from the Bordeaux and Copenhagen plaza projects to the many retrofits of failed public squares — all have that collaboration in them. A sculpture that is nearly skateable gets used once and abandoned.