Bordalo II’s Feminist Flamingo for International Women’s Day 2024
For International Women’s Day 2024, Portuguese artist Bordalo II created a monumental pink Big Trash Flamingo combining his environmental practice with a direct message about gender equality and women’s rights.
Constructed from discarded plastics, car parts, scrap metal and other waste materials, the flamingo carries phrases including “igualdade”, meaning equality, and “stop machismo”. The work brings together two recurring concerns within Bordalo II’s practice: the environmental consequences of consumer culture and the social inequalities he addresses through public art.
Bordalo II, Big Trash Flamingo, 2024. Image © Bordalo II.
A Bordalo II Big Trash Animal With a Feminist Message
Bordalo II is internationally recognised for his Big Trash Animals, monumental sculptures in which discarded materials are transformed into wildlife.
With the Feminist Flamingo, that familiar visual language becomes a platform for another conversation. Its vivid pink body attracts attention first, while the messages embedded across the sculpture direct the viewer towards questions of equality, sexism and the continuing fight for women’s rights.
Bordalo II’s Feminist Flamingo carries messages including “igualdade” and “stop machismo”. Image © Bordalo II.
Environmental Art Meets Social Activism
The use of waste remains fundamental to the work. Plastics and discarded objects are left visible within the flamingo’s body, connecting the sculpture to Bordalo II’s wider critique of overproduction, pollution and throwaway culture.
Yet the environmental message sits alongside an explicitly social one. Bordalo II has repeatedly used public interventions to address inequality, women’s rights and systems of power, concerns that also run through his wider Provoc and art-activism practice. His official description of Provoc identifies the exploitation of women among the social issues addressed within the series. (bordaloii.com)
Image Copyright Bordalo II
Bordalo II Feminist Flamingo: Art, Equality and Activism
Scale plays an important role in the impact of the sculpture. The oversized flamingo turns messages that can too easily disappear into everyday political discourse into something physically difficult to overlook.
Its colour is equally deliberate. Bright pink, discarded materials and direct language come together in an artwork that is playful from a distance yet increasingly political as the viewer moves closer.
The result is a Big Trash Animal that speaks simultaneously about environmental and social responsibility, asking what kind of society we build through the materials we consume and the values we choose to defend.
Video Copyright Bordalo II
The Feminist Flamingo sits at the intersection of Bordalo II’s Big Trash Animals and his socially engaged Provoc practice.
Bordalo II would later return to the flamingo as a subject through Flamingos da Ria Formosa in Olhão, where the species takes on a different meaning rooted in habitat, coastal ecology and the discarded materials threatening the natural environment.
Together, the works demonstrate how Bordalo II can revisit the same animal while allowing its meaning to shift according to place, material and social context.
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.
Images © Bordalo II.