‘UN WEEK-END À L’EST‘
2025

I had the honour and pleasure to illustrate the poster for this year’s UN WEEK-END À L’EST festival, together with the wonderful team from @paprika

This edition celebrates Bucharest, and between November 19 and December 1, Paris will be taken over by Romanian visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, dancers, and architects — from Cristian Mungiu and Dan Perjovschi to Mircea Cărtărescu, Subcarpați, Radu Pandele, Mircea Cantor, Cosmin Bumbuț, Dan Vezentan, Mihaela Drăgan, Taraf de Caliu, and many others.

My illustration shows the Palace of the Parliament as a huge, colourful funerary monument — inspired by the Merry Cemetery in Maramureș and by a Vlad Nancă piece where he added church domes to the building, as a critique of the corruption and excess behind both the People’s House and the National Cathedral.

Built in the ’80s–’90s, the Palace required demolishing an entire neighbourhood and displacing over 40,000 people, with many deaths during construction. That’s why I imagined it as a funerary monument. In an early sketch I also added the classic Bucharest warning “ATENȚIE, CADE TENCUIALA” (“Beware, falling plaster”) — a sign often used instead of actually fixing buildings, which felt like the perfect metaphor for the city itself. But we figured it wouldn’t translate very well in French and it wouldn’t be very relevant for people outside Bucharest so we dropped it.

So yea, I had a lot of fun illustrating this not-quite-homage to Bucharest and its paradoxical landmark.