Employing the subversive tactic of culture jamming, they created visual parodies about the big corporations arriving in Latvia (such as Marlboro cigarettes, the McDonald’s fast-food chain, Gilette razors and the Coca-Cola soft drink), with the goal of fighting consumer values voiced in ads, on the media and in politics. The artists partaking in the initiative asked the audiences to have a closer look at the recognizable brand identities and the corporations standing behind them, making them consider their effect on the marketing strategies of consumer goods. As curator Kaspars Vanags says in the catalogue of the initiative: “subversion, or a different thought variant is a violent intervention in the global system of images, carried out with the hope that the short circuits would, for a moment, interrupt the ceaseless flow of images. Perhaps, as the screen of virtual reality fades out, the visitor will rise up, stretch their limbs, crack their neck and… see an entirely different world around them. Not a better one, possibly, but definitely a truer one.”

Monika Pormale, the artist, characterizes the turn of the millennium as a time of intense and abrupt change, drawing parallels with the arrival of aggressive ads and marketing strategies into the local environment. “A broken glass bottle, also called a ‘little rose’, becomes a weapon like the aggressive coke commercial.”

Monika Pormale (1974) is an artist working in scenography, installation art and photography. Since the late 1990s, Monika Pormale has been mainly working as a stage designer and costume artist. Her name is well-known to audiences in Latvia and elsewhere in Europe. The range of Monika Pormale’s works varies from pure and conceptually clear installations to historically accurate stage designs characterized by a scrupulous approach to the tiniest detail, tone and nuance, generally revealing an unquenchable interest in the extraordinary things of everyday human life and a belief in humanism. She graduated the Department of Textile Art of the Rīga Art and Design Secondary School in 1993 and the Department of Stage Design at the Art Academy of Latvia in 1998.