Vasco Mourão works on the perception, texture and memory of the urban landscape. Only with a pen and time, his practice obsessively focuses on the representation of cities through drawings.

Inhabiting a place between fine art and illustration, Vasco Mourão creates bespoke artworks and large scale murals for various private collectors, galleries and institutions, while working also on selected editorial commissions. Now based in Pico Island, Portugal  & Barcelona, Spain (when not on the yearly work & travel walkabout).

Face Plastic Project
Hello, my name is Vasco Mourão. I’m a Portuguese artist and artistic director from Portugal, but I live in Barcelona. I also lived on Pico Island, in the middle of the Atlantic.

After the shipwreck in the island, suddenly all of our favorite places on the island were filled with trash. For everyone on the island, this trash felt like something that happened without fault. But we could see that it was basically our trash. It wasn’t even from another place — it was our own trash, now coming back to us through the water.

I wanted to start a conversation around this idea, that this trash is basically our face. I called it Face Plastic. In Portuguese and English, there’s this small linguistic trick: face plastic, plastic face. I walked all around the coastline, collecting this trash. Instead of just making a pile and saying, “Look at this trash,” I created masks — or faces — made from the debris. Because as humans, we tend to look when we recognize a face. So I did this very simple thing. I made many different masks, each one shaped by the debris I found. Plastic behaves in certain ways, and the coast was full of it. This direct connection — picking up trash from the ocean, turning it into an artwork, and starting a conversation — was very, very interesting.

It was the first time I had really done this kind of work. I also ended up doing a lot of sketching. I made, I think, six or seven different pieces, and I even had an exhibition in Barcelona with some of them. Then something strange happened.

I don’t know what my expectations were, but people started asking to buy the artworks. It felt really weird. So I decided that 50% of the proceeds would go to the Clean Water Foundation — at least to create some kind of balance, because otherwise it felt a bit like dirty money. There was a lot of trash — and also the idea of selling trash. So yes, I did this project on the island because the relationship between the locals and the trash on the coast was very particular.

For them, the trash was something that had simply happened. They didn’t feel any guilt about it. It was more like, “Okay, this is here now.” When I started asking about cleaning it up, they told me, “It’s fine, there will be a storm and it will clean itself.” Fishing was still going on as usual.

That was really impactful for me, because people had a very different relationship to the debris and the plastic. They saw it as something foreign, not as something connected to everyday life — even though these are objects we use all the time.

You could clearly recognize what the objects were: buoys, ropes, boxes, hats, so many bottle caps, bubble wrap, kits, buckets. All of this stuff.

And one thing people kept telling me was, “Your trash is very old — it was floating around the ocean for a long time before it reached the shore.” But I also found a very specific kind of trash. It was related to local celebrations: when there is a local party, they send up fireworks — rockets, firework rockets — and those remnants also end up in the ocean.

Carbon used to come as a powder in cardboard tubes, but now those tubes are plastic. When you shoot it into the sky, it explodes, and then it falls back down into the box — or onto the ground. So it became very obvious that this silly, really silly behavior had a very clear result. Then it was about looking at people, because the objects had a face. They were arranged as a face. Yeah, this was more complicated than we thought. Yeah — it’s face plastic project.