This graphic was created during the 2012 election year, as a response to the disconnect between politicians/political parties and the citizens they were supposed to serve. Looping around in a continuum, the design depicts an apparently endless and aimless Left Right “March”. The graphic is stylistically/experimentally inspired by Saul Bass’s Hitchcock film posters.

Caricat-ura was an interactive political art project symbolically conceived for the December 2009 commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in Romania. The name, “caricat-ura” is a play on words: “caricatura” means “caricature” in Romanian. Separately, “ura” means both “hooray” and “hate”. It’s a critique of the fact that after 20 years some people have forgotten the horrific damage this evil couple has caused, and have grown a romantic nostalgia for them.

The idea of the project was to hand over - in symbolic, life-size effigy form - former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, to “the people”, and let them decide what to do with them: memorialize or symbolically destroy them. Life-size, downloadable caricatures of the couple were made available via the Internet, in several formats which could easily be printed “at home”. He is depicted characteristically waving his right arm up and down, while she is shown typically holding her purse in front with both hands. Also provided were headshots, smaller drawings, and a few interpretative examples.

This was a protest against the 1999 NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia: against using violence (particularly, the bombing of civilians) to establish peace, and, especially, against the biased and un-verified information published by the media unanimously supporting the war. Many front page declarations included only in small print the word “alleged” (for Serbian crimes which could be quelled by freely bombing). The overall deficiency in critical thinking and blinded support for the government by our (US, also UK) news agencies was horrifying, for that is the essence of a dictatorship. What is freedom without discussion and debate?

The quote posters, placed throughout MIT (where Ioana was in grad school/24 hours a day), in eye-catching large amounts were based on reports from other international news organizations (mostly Eastern Europe, Germany, France, and some US/UK) and from people at the war site. They were printed in blue to symbolize peace or peaceful things, like the blue sky. The posters went through several design iterations before finally being reduced to just the necessary: the quotes/other news. The quotes were purposely cut off to suggest both violence and a continuum of information.