The rabbit on the wall

This mural stopped me in my tracks. It's on a wall in Bonfim — the same neighbourhood I was staying in — and it's been there long enough that the locals barely glance at it. But I stood in front of it for a good ten minutes.

The rabbit is by Bordalo II, a Portuguese artist who makes large-scale wildlife murals entirely from rubbish. Tyres, bumpers, broken plastic, scrap metal — he collects it, sorts it by colour, and builds animals out of it on the sides of buildings. The rabbit here is probably three storeys tall. Up close you can see every piece of junk it's made from. Step back and it's just a rabbit.

The point isn't subtle, but it doesn't need to be. Porto has a serious problem with waste — the city generates more plastic per person than almost anywhere else in western Europe, and the Douro carries a lot of it out to sea. Bordalo's animals are a way of making that visible. You can't walk past a giant rabbit built from bin bags and pretend you haven't seen it.

What I find interesting, photographically, is the scale. My lovely Wife in this frame is standing directly in front of it and she barely reaches the rabbit's chest. I didn't ask her to stand there — she was just looking at it, the same as me. I took the shot because the contrast said everything the mural was trying to say: we made all this mess, and it's bigger than us now.