Bordalo II’s Wild Wild Waste: A Trash Animal Zoo in Las Vegas
Portuguese artist Bordalo II transformed a former motel in Downtown Las Vegas into Wild Wild Waste, an immersive 10,000-square-foot world of Trash Animals created for the sixth edition of the Life is Beautiful Festival. Curated and produced by global creative house Justkids and powered by Zappos, the installation expanded Bordalo II’s environmental sculpture into an extraordinary walk-through parody of a zoo.
Prepared over five weeks, Wild Wild Waste confronted human waste production, pollution and the commodification of animal habitats while surrounding visitors with monumental creatures constructed from the discarded materials of consumer culture.
Bordalo II’s Big Trash Animals
Bordalo II’s Big Trash Animals are constructed from end-of-life materials including plastics, tyres, vehicle parts, scrap metal and other objects recovered from wastelands, recycling centres and discarded urban environments.
The waste remains deliberately recognisable. By using the remnants of human consumption to recreate wildlife, Bordalo II connects the animals directly with the pollution and environmental pressures threatening their habitats.
Inside the Bordalo II Trash Zoo
Wild Wild Waste transformed Bordalo II’s individual animal sculptures into an immersive zoo parody, placing visitors inside an environment where wildlife appeared surrounded, confined or endangered by human waste.
The installation used spectacle and humour to draw audiences closer before revealing a more uncomfortable message about overconsumption, habitat destruction and society’s relationship with the materials it throws away.
Inside Bordalo II’s Wild Wild Waste Zoo
Across the abandoned motel, Bordalo II created six large-scale animal installations, including a lion confined within a truck, a whale entangled in fishing nets, penguins standing among plastic debris, pandas assembled from discarded vehicle parts, white foxes and mischievous monkeys.
Together, the animals turned the motel into a surreal artificial habitat in which the consequences of human consumption became impossible to separate from the creatures themselves.
“Bordalo is inspired by the rejected, the broken, the wasted, somehow our everyday; With the trash we refuse to be responsible for he creates a fantastic installation that is playful and, furthermore that question our relation to waste and our responsibility.”
Charlotte Dutoit, JustKids curator
Waste, Responsibility and the Environment
The playful scale of Wild Wild Waste carried a deliberately serious message. Instead of presenting discarded plastics, tyres and industrial materials as an abstract environmental problem, Bordalo II gave that waste animal form.
The viewer was confronted with wildlife physically surrounded by the consequences of human behaviour, creating a direct visual relationship between consumption, waste production and the degradation of natural habitats.
“We were so humbled to have the opportunity to help host the art of Bordalo at Life Is Beautiful this past weekend. The entire installation’s emotional nature gave us all a little lesson in doing more with less in our work and in our environment.” Tyler Williams, Zappos
Bordalo II at Life Is Beautiful 2018
The Life Is Beautiful Festival took place across Downtown Las Vegas from 21 to 23 September 2018, bringing together music, art, food and ideas across the city’s urban landscape.
For its sixth edition, Bordalo II’s Wild Wild Waste became one of the festival’s major immersive art experiences, demonstrating how environmental sculpture could move beyond a single public artwork and become an entire world through which audiences could physically walk.
From Big Trash Animals to an Immersive Environment
Wild Wild Waste marked an important expansion of Bordalo II’s Big Trash Animals, transforming the series from individual monumental sculptures into an immersive environment filled with competing stories of wildlife, waste and human responsibility.
The project also continued Bordalo II’s creative relationship with JustKids. A year earlier, he had taken part in the JustKids-curated Green Candy project in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which explored waste, sustainability and environmental awareness through public art. By 2018, that shared language had expanded dramatically in Las Vegas, where Wild Wild Waste turned Bordalo II’s Trash Animals into a fully immersive experience.
Its entangled whale and plastic-filled marine imagery also connect directly with Bordalo II and the Sea, while the exhibition-scale ambition anticipated the increasingly experimental environments later explored through EVILUTION.
Discover Bordalo II at GraffitiStreet
Discover available Bordalo II artworks at GraffitiStreet, contact us to discuss availability, acquisitions and private viewings, or visit GraffitiStreet Gallery, 25A West Street, Chichester, West Sussex, England PO19 1QW.
Photography © JustKids.