A mural by anonymous street artist Banksy, critical of Brexit, has been officially demolished along with the dilapidated building where it was painted. Authorities have now promised to recover at least some of the remains.
The three-story painting appeared on the side of a building in Dover, UK, in 2017, a year after the historic referendum that inspired it. In it, a worker is depicted standing over one last carving one of the EU stars into the flag. At the time, its value was valued by Banksy collector John Brandler at £1 million.
In 2019, scaffolding was installed in front of the building and it was whitewashed, but some of the elements were later restored. It had also been vandalized. Dover acquired the land and some adjacent properties in 2022, but it was later estimated that maintaining the mural would have cost Dover taxpayers around £2–4 million.
“We're working with the company to identify what can and can't be done with the bits they've taken,” Dover District Council member Kevin Mills told The Sun tabloid. “The whole thing can't be done. be saved anyway. It was a very old building.”
The mural was on one of three “increasingly dilapidated and dangerous” buildings that Dover council announced would be demolished earlier this year as part of a plan to redevelop the Bench Street site. The scheme includes the construction of a creative hub, an educational campus, a shopping center and a park. At the time, the City Council said it had appointed Madrid-based Factum Arte to “digitize and preserve” Banksy so that it could be recreated digitally or even physically in the future.
“In collaboration with Dover District Council, in March 2023, a team from the Factum Foundation was tasked with recording the shape and surface of the painted wall in high resolution, using LiDAR and photogrammetry, in order to preserve the digital data of the wall painted, which will become part of the city’s historical record, in addition to the numerous photos taken of the work before its disappearance,” Factum Arte said in a statement at the time.
“The high-resolution data can now be used to recreate the artwork in digital or even physical format as a facsimile, in a new location in the city or elsewhere, subject to Banksy’s approval,” read the Factum Arte statement.
Source: Artnet News