As we draw closer to the new year we’ve asked a very special guest every day to take a moment to reflect on 2017 and to tell us about one photograph that best captures the year for them. It’s an assortment of treats to surprise you with every day – to enjoy and contemplate as we all reflect on the year that has passed and conjure our hopes and wishes for 2018. This is our way of sharing the sweetness of the season and of saying ‘Thank You’ to each of you for inspiring us throughout the year.

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Spanish Street Artist and fine artist Vermibus has been re-rendering posh pictures of fashion poses on public ad spaces for a handful of years now. His insight into how emotions and self image are impacted by advertisements is now concise and his rendering of opinion is clarion. More than 600 installations later, not only has his work become a powerful critique of twisted class and beauty standards, it’s a reclamation of public space and mindspace that we have allowed to become privatized. Today Vermibus shows us a photo he took in Berlin this year and tells us about revisiting one of his original lightbox spots and discovering something new that he wasn’t expecting.

VERMIBUS

This year I came across an empty lightbox and this one immediately caught my attention.

Many years ago, when I was just starting as Vermibus, I did an intervention in this spot but I didn’t realize until this day how beautiful and full of meaning this space was. Maybe it was the blue light from the moment, the empty street, or the closed windows from the building but they all together made some kind of poetical meaning for me, and I was touched by it.

This silent box gave me more than I was expecting, it gave me peace.

I never felt so connected with any campaign in the way I felt connected with the absence of it; this lack of message was stimulating my imagination and my reflection. I couldn’t tell if this was an intervention or it just happened naturally, who the person was who did it, or what was the aim of it – if there was an aim at all.

I end up realizing that in fact all this didn’t really matter, the information was there for the ones who could read it, and I was one of them.

My wish is that more people can see the message that is hidden in those empty shiny spaces in the same way I did.

Vermibus. Berlin, Germany. July, 2017. (photo © Vermibus)

Vermibus

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