A destructive place of work

March 24, 2014 by viancavicente

For this current assignment, it focuses on my Portuguese street artist, Vhils, and the technique and theme of destruction being carried out into an architectural space. In many of Vhils’ work, he incorporates messages into his art that looks at global problems and expressing their issues by using destructive tools to create art. Seen in his well-known wall carvings, in places such as Portugal, China and Rio, it consists of him carving walls of gentrified areas where these carvings would be the faces of victims of gentrification. Inspired by this idea, Vhils would use Venom as his destructive force. Venom, an extraterrestrial Symbiote species, would take over a host and feed off of their negative emotions to help strengthen his powers. He’ll also block out and slowly damage the host’s mind leading into taking over the host’s body. In an architectural way, viewing Venom with the ability to “take over,” Vhils would address this issue by using Venom as the destructive force that would take over an existing structure. Further inspired by Tamsin Van Essen’s Erosion series, which focuses on a host being eaten away by a parasite, then highlighting the “infection” that ruins the host. Venom would be viewed as a biological erosive force, similar to a lichen that feeds off of the nutrients found in the cracks and surfaces of rocks. Venom would feed at the already existing cracks or damages of built areas and further destroy it. In process of exploring Venom destroying a structure, I experimented with ways to destroy solid objects with liquid-like substances. Working first with nail polish melting Styrofoam, and boiled water melting ice cubes, I went into analyzing different ways to control the way the ice would melt, and resulted in using salt. From this, I discovered a way for Vhils to create the starting point of Venom’s path of destruction. Therefore changing the overall atmosphere into a place of ruins that would be poetically destroyed.

Inspirations