Wool Festival 2011

For WOOL's inaugural 2011 edition, Vhils carved a portrait into a weathered concrete retaining wall on Rua das Portas do Sol in Covilhã, a city built and later hollowed out by Portugal's wool industry. The programme set out to recover that industrial identity through contemporary art; the portrait, worked into moss, erosion stains and decades of weathering, reads as a comment on the ageing of Portugal's interior and the social cost of its economic decline. It was among the first walls Vhils produced for WOOL under Scratching the Surface.