Bordalo II: How to turn garbage into a work of art

While some artists start their creations from sketches and compiling a plan, the Portuguese Bordalo II begins to create each of his monstrous animals from what goes to abandoned factories or dumps and collects garbage there. Bumpers of cars, tires, door frames, various plastic things, and even whole bicycles, old mopeds, or the cars themselves – everything is going right. And only in the able hands of the artist all this trash turns into animals.

The animals Bordalo II creates are, of course, very specific, but they are easily recognizable and they definitely have their own charm. Even if we are talking about a hedgehog that has car tires instead of eyes and nose, or a pelican with a beak of pipes, the Bordalo II creations are still attractive in their own way. Of course, there would not be such an effect if the artist did not use the aerocarbon, which graffiti is usually painted. It is this stroke that brings the works of the Portuguese a recognizable style.

As befits a modern artist working with garbage (and with each passing day it becomes more and more), Bordalo II wants to draw public attention to pollution by his works. “The idea is to depict the very nature, in this case animals, of materials that are responsible for their [extinction],” the artist explains. Thus, he hopes to make pollution of the environment more obvious. “People often do not realize that their daily lives are changing too much, we use too many resources that turn too quickly into garbage, polluting everything around us.”

With well over 8,000 visitors in its first week, Attero (Latin for waste) opened on November 4, 2017 and runs through November 26. You can see many more photos on Facebook and Instagram.