Art by Artur Bordalo

Bordalo studied painting for eight years at Lisbon's Faculty of Fine Arts before switching almost entirely to building large sculptures out of trash: old tires, broken appliances, scrap plastic and metal, assembled into lifelike animals mounted on walls and building façades. He works under the name Bordalo II as a tribute to his grandfather, painter Real Bordalo. Between 2012 and 2022 he built roughly 200 of these "Trash Animals" from an estimated 60 to 115 tons of waste, including a giant swallow covering a building face in Łódź, Poland. In 2023 he staged a protest installation of oversized fake 500-euro notes at the site of a papal visit, criticizing the public money spent hosting it.