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🫠 these past 2 months have felt like squeezing an elephant through a pin hole, however, as promised here is a link to the translated version of While we wait #7, previews of While we wait #6 and #8, as well as the comix publication 9 local cartoonists and myself put together. The website of the Cosmics collections is underway, you will be able to grab a copy by June 💌 through Cărturești & friends as well as Cărturești Mercy

👻 To celebrate this independent edition, featuring risograph spreads, multicoloured covers as well as inserts of various shapes and sizes, I made around 50 linocuts. Some of these linoprints will be available alongside the first batch of AAA to reach our friendly local bookshops.

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A short comic comprising some of Vlad Niculescu's memories of Anthony Frost Bookshop, its closing in 2017 and the myriad ways in which bookstores bind us. Here is Alex Clapp's article in the Times Literary Supplement about the place. The sequential narrative traces the historical transformations of the locations which are home to Cărturești&friends as well as Anthony Frost Bookshop. Visual references range from Saul Steinberg's work to Iordan Chimet's Anthology of Innocence and Willy Pragher documentary photography.

It was important for me to bring together some of the people who have tied my ways to the sequential medium, so here are a few of them: Milos of Hardcomics and Aooleu! newspaper, Vlad of Cărturești&friends, Anamaria Pravicencu of Jumătatea Plină and Sâmbăta Sonoră, assoc. professor Mihaela Precup, Matei Branea and Ciubi. There are too many people to count, from the teams of Decât o Revistă, to Vice Romania and Scena9, every one of these links has brought me closer to visual narratives.

link to Romanian version is here, hope to have an English translation 🔜 https://issuu.com/sorivazelina/docs/frost_and_friends

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This open ended trail of tales came together in a random order, akin to the winter's stranded swans, caught between ice blocks, floating along the Bega river.

⛅︎ Was supposed to post more stuff at the end of 2025, however, the first snowy season in more than 10 years froze all of my plans. So, while I am trying to defrost, here is a snippet of life with dogs

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📚 This is a post about the bookshop network behind most of my collections. This year, Cărturești celebrated 25 years and its spectacular Carusel headquarters counted its tenth anniversary by inviting several illustrators on board for a visual bonanza. I was in charge of their Mișcarea pentru Lectură pack of materials (^.^ 🙏 Isa & George for the support), which covered a mural, an animation, all sorts of elements I'll try to round up, like shots of a zine I did as a 🎁 present 🗺️ for the team at Cărturești & Friends, whose book keepers Vlad and Paul are a great inspiration. Many of the volumes I treasure came via Anthony Frost Bookshop (the former home of Vlad).

🫣 I realise that there is a quantifiable amount of stuff I haven't uploaded in a while, now. Might have an end of the year roundup of all the sketchbooks that've pilled up, alongside the maps I didn't get to upload from the previous project and another one that will be showcased in January 2026 🫠

🔗tote bags 🔗totes 👜 postcards 💌

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✧ ✶ ✺ A bit about this project I co-wrote here ❋ https://issuu.com/sorivazelina/docs/shift_ ✺ ✲ ✧ few more pics here

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Summer went by and these postcards from late September, in Bucharest, keep a trace of the solstitial afterglow. Started working on the visual identity of Street Delivery in July-August, so hopefully some of the rays of those days stretch out through these pixelated frames.

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fragments of The Silent Escape, by Lena Constante, in sequential form, available as a limited edition and in scrollable pixelated form here: https://issuu.com/sorivazelina/docs/the_silent_escape ◾️ Hard copies available via [email protected]

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Sort of manga for the 20th year anniversary of the magazine belonging to the team behind Otaku festival, soon to be published. One of the oldest trees, in the Romanian capital city, almost burned down around 4 years ago, leaving behind a hollow inside. Ever since the incident, a piece of metal is strapped to its side, turning it into an occasional refuge for the homeless. This is the roughly translated version, the printed one is in Romanian.

The alt manga is about the spirit of a world living on the outskirts, almost forgotten by the hijacked revolution's aftermath. To look forward, this homeless grandfather keeps in mind the words of Lena Constante as well as the old-survivor-tree's lessons of life.

☯︎ This December marks 35 years since the Revolution of 1989, back when Ceaușescu's dictatorship ended. Nationalism, coupled with nostalgia for the by-gone Communist era, alongside homophobe outbursts and pro-extreme right Legionari fanatics have bombarded our everyday scrollable realities and, according to some, almost lead to a second Mineriad. Meanwhile, the presidential elections've been rescheduled for spring 2025.

♗♤🃟Gonna end this post and the year with a reminder to support causes such as the Innitiative Group defending the I.O.R. Park and independent journalists such as the guys at Snoop, tracing the tangled web behind our chaotic Romanian political life.

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🪡🧵Romanian women have been coding signs for ages. Their threads bind apotropaic symbols into scrolls of fabrics and garments, according to complex systems, which have been developing since the Neolithic ages. In this pocket size comics collection I tried to gather bits of the pixel's long forgotten story. The rough English version of the 36 page publication is available here >>> https://issuu.com/sorivazelina/docs/mostrar2_eng

To flip through the Romanian version please visit the exhibition, at the Peasant Museum in Bucharest, open till the 9th of January 2025. It was built as a reflection on a unique anonymous textile piece, discovered in the archive of the ASTRA Museum in Sibiu. The hyper-sensorial works, leading up to this marvel of over 200 embroidered motifs, belong to artists such as Aurelie Morillas, Marlene Herberth, Marin Raica, Sillyconductor, Anamaria Lungu, Atelier Vrac, all brought together by the Dala Foundation and Ovidiu Daneș, who has been saving the local architectural, intangible and natural heritage, together with his wife Luminița, for more than a decade, also via the CUCA festival.

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🃟 It's been almost 20 years since I started down the path of visual communication. Here is a small selection of self-published works, plus a few commissioned ones. Artist books, zines, brochures, educational kits, maps, etc.. Hardcomics were the first to distribute my comics, including While We Wait #1. Later, Centrala U.K. launched Old Farts during Offprint London 2019. Done back in 2018 this piece about the harm reduction efforts of Carusel kind of summed up my search for visual solutions to complicated social issues, which need to reach the attention of everyday people. Aiding cultural and educational organisations in putting together materials which could stand alongside the loud messages plastering our daily experience seemed to be my metier. Yeah, something along those lines... 〠

This is my first online home, which later developed into a thing for film photography, to finally divest interests into two acounts > #1 < + > #2< whilst the 🍒 on top od the whole operation is the Behance account. Guess that all this accountant work is to say that I am taking a break for a while.

☻ Thank you for sticking around for the ride ✌︎

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☠︎ This zine is the first in a series on death, alternative ways of looking at the end and grieving methods. Research into the liminal space has unearthed colourful cemeteries around Romania, some practises dating back to the Neolithic ages, as well as the popular folk calendar - which retraces agricultural activities and links them to performances, herbal remedies and the pre-Christian spiritual realm. One peculiar sort of performance includes sickle duels, it is played out by young ladies during the Sânziene ritual, in some local villages.

There are currently 30 hand sewn copies, might prepare 20 more in the future since this limited edition has been sold out within a few hours. All printed by The Secret Garden from Timișoara. 10 copies are available at Indecis Artist Run Space, a few more will make their way to Bucharest's Cărturești&friends and Hamburg, in the near future.

♥︎

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KraftMade are opening a new exhibition in Cincu, next to the fortified church that's been around for hundreds of years, as part of the Saxon cultural heritage. For the event I prepared a bunch of stuff.

Rituals are often tied to nature, so while working with some of the shapes they have come to embody in Cincu, I tried to understand the subject by using a playful approach. The result is an array of masks, dancing through different media. Masks belonging to the local Fuga Lolelor tradition and those of foreign cultures clash in colourful prints or are suspended in a layered web. The first aid kit addresses the contemporary crisis of identity facing globalised societies. What would the salvation of a custom consist of? Could a tangible solution be something as simple as a children’s game?

Fragments of the time spent in Șona seeped into the work for the KraftMade crew in Cincu. Here is a stack of sketches collected during the 2 month residency program Șona AIR, like those above.

Last Saturday I visited Ioana Ciolea, aka Punky, and her colleague Andrei at Muzeul Cineastului Amator, where they showed me a fresh batch of collected posters from Communist era Romania. You can view most of them here, home to childrens' books, toys and trinkets found around flea markets. Ioana and Andrei also handle the salon of Combinatul Siderurgic Reșița, that's been functioning since 1771.

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A gnarly churning machine is what produced this comic, and a grinding 🔥 out time it has been since my last post. The Theatre of Youth premiered Chekhov's The Seagull according to director Christian Benedetti's vision, merging spaces and disturbing expectations.

While I was away confronting my demons, somebody asked ( @mme-patate ) what my top 5 favourite tracks might be. I kept rattling my brains and came up with a top of radio shows I listen to, since music seems an endless pursuit: Turtles Have Short Legs, 150 session, Big Road Blues, Kranky and every once in a while either the Opera Show or RebelUpNightShop. Hope it helps.

Between the end of February and late April I took part, alongside Micul Haos's Maria Mandea and George Marian Preduț, in an artist in residency program taking part in the vicinity of Hermanstadt. Monica Dănilă, the coordinator of the Șona AIR project, through Fundația Ștefan Câlția asked us to explore the possibilities available in this small village, home to the painter and to the foundation's restoration projects. Besides the workshop we did with 21 local kids, the residency gave me the chance to work on my upcoming book. You can read more about the macabre and my churning state of mind in the May issue of Elle magazine, in which Ioana Ulmeanu was kind enough to squeeze me in with a very elegant take on what a burnt out artist turns to in times of despair.

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🤦🏻‍♀️ the version above was rejected, the theatre team went for another ☹︎ ♼ ⚠︎ ⚙︎ ☹︎

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Almost done with this collaboration, which covered some of the Shamanelism graphics - a project which included building a music studio in the Penitentiary of Craiova and events promoting the outcome of the 2 year long training for young outcasts lead by Boacă "Jerry" Dumitru and Andrei Dinescu's team - as well as the façade for the collection of Roma memorable Manele melodies up on Fonoteca Sumnakay. Unfortunately, the stuff you see above didn't always jive with what the teams behind the websites and materials had in mind. Hopefully in the future Manele artists will garner more from the visual domain than it's been able to grant them so far, and perhaps somehow we can gradually dismantle the historical discrimination which has enveloped Roma culture for over 600 years, in our little corner of Europe.

P.S. Would like to apologise to Mrs Denisa Sârboaica, I am slowly learning more about the female voices behind Manele. The final covers featured the proper portrait, alongside Victor Plastic's mandatory metal motifs harkening back to ancient Roman methods of cursing souls. Thank you Andrei Dinescu for your constant hard work and for putting up with us tortured convoluted characters.

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Last year was most likely the hardest year so far, it ended with more work researching the lives of local craftsmen and uploading it on www.mestering.ro. In parallel with this, versions of visual approaches for Clemens Bechtel's staging of War and Peace and... gobbled up most of my time. Here are a few of the resulting outputs.

Besides printed and online materials for the Theatre of Youth Piatra Neamț, last year saw the printing of several publications containing some of my contributions. One of the is the Art Encounters Biennial catalogue, another is Galeria Posibilă's The Use of Landscape. Below is roughly 5% of what the mad hare 2023 amounted to. Glad to have been part of the supporters of Timișoara European Capital of Culture 2023 and to have made it out alive through all the deadline storms and tribulations.