Bordalo II

Artur Bordalo (born 1987), known professionally as Bordalo II (pronounced and sometimes written Bordalo Segundo), is a Portuguese street artist and self-described artivist. His work consists mainly of large installations and murals made from recycled trash, with the intention of highlighting waste and over-consumption in our world today.

Early life and education Artur Bordalo was born in Lisbon in 1987. As a youth, he spent many hours observing his grandfather, a painter called Artur Real Bordalo, (1925–2017). He started doing graffiti art with spray paint on walls when he was 11 years old. and sometimes written as "Bordalo Segundo".

His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions and mounted in streets across the world, including Singapore, the United States, French Polynesia, and Europe. Big Trash Animals was also created in North America and Latin America.

One of his public sculptures of animals is the huge Plastic Mero (representing an Atlantic goliath grouper), created from marine debris and installed in 2019 on the seafront in Funchal, Portugal. Another is a huge Iberian lynx in the Parque das Nações, a district of Lisbon, which he created for the World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth in 2019 and Youth Forum Lisboa+21.

In Railway Series, in Portugal, Bordalo used train tracks, painted in bright colours. was exhibited at the Europa Building in Brussels during the semester of the Portuguese presidency of the EU, later becoming part of the European Parliament's Contemporary Art Collection.

In April 2021, two sculptures of seahorses were unveiled at the Gambelas campus of the University of Algarve in Faro, Portugal.

Magellanic Penguins was created for the Portuguese Pavilion in the Expo 2020 in Dubai, which ran from October 2021 until March 2022, and in July 2022 his work was exhibited in Singapore. An exhibition of his work titled EVILUTION was mounted in at Edu Hub Lisbon from October to December 2022.

In July 2023, shortly before a scheduled visit by Pope Francis, Bordalo broke into one the venues where he would be celebrating a mass, and laid out his latest creation - a huge carpet composed of giant 500-euro banknotes. His intention is to highlight how much has been spent on the event – an estimated 161 million euros – by the Portuguese Government (30 million euros), the Catholic Church, and Lisbon and Loures city councils.

Other activities Bordalo supports Portuguese refugee advocacy organisation Humans Before Borders, which helps to fund five medical NGOs working in refugee camps on the Greek islands of Lesbos and Samos.

In film A short documentary film entitled Bordalo II: A Life of Waste was released by the Irish Film Board in 2017.

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