In Sunday February 26, during the football match between Besiktas and Antalyaspor, in Istanbul, the supporters wished to pay homage to the children victims of the earthquake which, three weeks earlier, had caused tens of thousands of deaths in the east from Turkey. Only 4 minutes and 17 seconds after kick-off (referring to 4:17 a.m., the time when the first tremors took place, on February 6), sheaves of teddy bears and other comforters flew from the bleachers to land on the edges of the field, as if it had begun to snow in large multicolored flakes. Collected at the end of this consolatory happening, these sweet objects were then offered to the minor victims.
This moving moment is part of a broader movement to extend the field of plush toys, which in recent years have become a link between childhood and adulthood. The teddy bear, as we know, is emblematic of the first years of life and, according to psychiatrist Donald Winnicott, the transitional object par excellence. A substitute for the mother’s breast, it provides a reassuring intermediate area between the interior and the exterior, the subjective and the objective, the ideal satisfaction of desires and reality. “This object is doomed to gradual disinvestment, so that over the years it is not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo, wrote, in 1951, Winnicott in Transitional Objects. (…) It loses its meaning, and this because the transitional phenomena have become diffuse, have spread over the entire intermediate territory which is situated between the “inner psychic reality” and the “external world in the common perception of two people”; in other words, because they cover the whole field of culture. »
To become great would be – to take a shortcut – dropping her old teddy to socialize. If we look a little closer, we will see that this vision of things is partly obsolete. Today, in the world of adults, stuffed animals are everywhere, as if our cities and countryside had been enriched by a new category of citizens with the softness of childish transitional objects and the XXL size of adults. . For example, in recent months I have seen a big bear at the entrance to the Citadium shopping center in Paris, another sitting on the terrace of a bistro, as if waiting for his half. Of course, they are not the size of Xonita, which, with its 19.41 meters long and 4.4 tons, made the reputation of the city of Xonacatlan, Mexico. On April 30, 2019, after three months of making, Xonita, with her little pink bow in her hair, became the biggest soft toy in the world.
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