IIACHOO!!

Description

An elderly woman bends violently forward in the middle of a sneeze. Her headscarf flies backwards, her handbag and walking stick escape her grasp, and her false teeth shoot dramatically from her mouth. Banksy reduces the figure almost entirely to black and white, allowing the exaggerated movement of the body and scattering objects to carry the image.

The mural was positioned at the bottom of Vale Street in Totterdown, famous for its exceptionally steep gradient. Seen from the correct viewpoint, the surrounding houses appear to tilt dramatically behind the woman, as though the force of her sneeze were powerful enough to blow over an entire street. Banksy's own photograph pushed the illusion further by positioning a man with an inverted umbrella and a wheelie bin downhill from the figure, apparently caught in the same blast.

A Sneeze in the Year of Covid

Aachoo!! appeared on the morning of 10 December 2020, and Banksy confirmed it that afternoon through his website and Instagram.

The timing inevitably placed the work within the Covid-19 pandemic. By the end of 2020, the sneeze had ceased to be an innocent bodily reflex: it had become associated with contagion, masks, distancing and anxiety about proximity to others. Banksy had already addressed the pandemic earlier that year with Game Changer and his London Underground rats.

Yet Aachoo!! approaches the subject through slapstick rather than solemnity. The flying dentures, handbag and walking stick turn the sneeze into an almost cartoonish explosion. The humor does not diminish the anxiety of the period; it provides a way of representing it. Something invisible and microscopic is imagined as a physical force powerful enough to overturn everything around it.

The Street Completes the Image

The mural is particularly successful as a piece of street art because its meaning depends upon its location. Vale Street's famous gradient is not background scenery but effectively part of the composition. Banksy manipulates perspective so that the architecture appears to respond to the woman's sneeze.

This places Aachoo!! within an important strand of Banksy's practice in which existing urban elements complete an intervention: the CCTV camera in What Are You Looking At?, the yellow road markings of Flower Painter, the telephone box of Spy Booth, or the bus shelter and street furniture later incorporated into A Great British Spraycation. The city is not simply Banksy's canvas; it becomes part of his visual vocabulary.

From House Wall to Art Object

The mural immediately transformed the fortunes of the modest semi-detached house on which it appeared. The property was already in the process of being sold, and the sudden arrival of a Banksy generated intense media attention and speculation about its value. Contrary to early reports that the owners had abandoned the sale, the transaction was merely paused while the family considered the implications. They initially installed transparent protection and discussed ways of ensuring that the work remained in Bristol.

That intention did not last. By February 2021 the mural had disappeared behind boarding, and on 12 March 2021, workers cut out the entire section of masonry containing the figure. A crane lifted Banksy's elderly woman away from the house and onto a waiting vehicle.

The removal fundamentally changed the work. Aachoo!! had been conceived around one of Bristol's steepest streets: the apparently collapsing houses were part of Banksy's joke. Once the painted wall was separated from Vale Street, the woman survived as an object, but the sneeze lost much of its force.