Vhils: Graffiti Art as Architectural Archaeology

Disintegrating walls and peeling posters may not be everyone’s cup of tea. In fact I would venture that to most people they are a rather dispiriting sign of urban decay.  Yet to one artist the sight of crumbling architecture and aged billboards posted one atop another atop another are a creative spur. Vhils creates art not by adding but by taking away.

Image Credit Flickr User Lord Jim

Image Credit Flickr User Salotte

Vhils, born Alexandre Fartos in 1987 in Portugal, chips, slices, cuts and hammers his remarkable art out of the sides of buildings.  It started when he was a youth in Lisbon.  Portugal’s recent history meant that billboards advertising expensive consumer goods could be pasted directly over posters of socialist ideals left over from the 1974 revolution in a layer which could, depending on the amount of posters, centimeters thick.

Cork: Harvest for the Patient Farmer

Have you ever wondered where that cork in your bottle of wine comes from?  The answer is most likely to be Spain or Portugal, where over half of the world’s cork is harvested - it is in fact the National Tree of the latter country.

However, unlike other forms of forestry, the production of cork never involves the death of a tree.

Instead, they are gently stripped, leaving a strange but fascinating landscape of denuded trunks.

Image Credit Flickr User btbuonvino

If You Have Never Wanted to Visit Portugal, You Will After Watching This

Photographer and filmmaker Kirill Neiezhmakov has excelled himself this time.  Visiting Portugal in May 2014 he took in Lisbon and Sesimbra, creating this amazing combination of time-lapse and hyperlapse, with a little tilt shift thrown in for good measure.  The merge from one place to another is seamless (how does he do that?) as is the transition from terra firma to water.  An outstanding piece of film.