Bruno Colaço

Photojournalist/Documentary Photographer
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Hidden and Forgotten
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Nationality: Portuguese
Biography: Bruno was born in 1984 and he is a Lisbon-based photojournalist and documentary photographer. In 2006 he ended his studies in photography and photojournalism at the Portuguese Institute of Photography. Since then, he has covered news and stories... MORE
Public Story
Hidden and Forgotten
Copyright Bruno Colaço 2024
Date of Work May 2020 - Dec 2021
Updated Apr 2022
Topics Aerial, Documentary, Environment, Extruded polystyrene foam, Labels, Metal and plastic lids, Personal, Personal Projects, Photography, Pollution, Polucans, Sponges, Tissue wrappers, Tubes
In March 2020, during the first confinement caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, I took advantage of the time I spent at home with my wife and our 4 children to renovate the small backyard in the back of our house, located on the outskirts of Lisbon.

It involved demolishing an existing structure, tearing up the ground, and deepening the ground a little in one of the corners of the yard. During that year, in a small rectangle measuring 4 by 3 meters, I unearthed dozens and dozens of objects such as cans, bottles, assorted plastics, extruded polystyrene foam, tubes, metal and plastic lids, labels, chewing gum or tissue wrappers, sponges, and even a comb, which, around 21 years later, saw the light of day again. Materials that could and should have been recycled. Some of them with the expiration date still stamped on the label, suggesting that they were left there when the house and the entire neighborhood were built between 1999 and 2000.

In a neighborhood with 96 houses, where identical construction predominates, part of a small town with more than 400 single-family houses, many of them built by the same construction companies, I imagined that this problem would most likely be replicated in some, not to say, all of them.

21 years have passed and a lot has changed since then. Still, surprised by what I found hidden and forgotten under the ground, I can't help but wonder what happens to the garbage produced during the construction phase of a house these days.
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Hidden and Forgotten by Bruno Colaço
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