It Is There, Visible Yet Silent

The Limits of the Tolerable in Urban Childhood Figurations and the Socio-Legal Status of Children and Adolescents

Abstract

In September 2025, the urban intervention “El niño” [“The Child”], by artist Sebastián Andreatta (BiH), erupted into the public space of the Palermo neighborhood in the city of Buenos Aires, generating intense reactions across mass media, social media platforms, and among passersby. The sculpture—depicting a faceless, hooded child, motionless and withdrawn into a corner of the sidewalk—was displayed outside any institutional circuit and without state authorization. This article proposes a socio-semiotic approach to the work, based on a qualitative methodological strategy oriented toward the systematic analysis of a heterogeneous corpus comprising nationally circulated journalistic articles, audiovisual recordings of interactions in public space, and comments and reactions on social media. On the basis of this material, the study reconstructs the intervention’s signifying properties, identifies its discursive regularities, and analyzes the effects of meaning produced through its circulation.

It will be argued that, beyond any authorial intentionality, the work not only gives rise to a crisis of classification that suspends the ordinary metacommunicative frames of everyday life and exposes—through a regime of radical indeterminacy and a game of intrigues—the limits of the symbolic order in processing conflict in public space, thereby activating responses of fear, violence, or action where indifference is the prevailing norm, but also simultaneously reveals an emerging socio-legal conception of children and adolescents.