When Cartoons Invade Reality

In a modern society where we're inundated with mass media - a 24-hour news cycle, a constant stream of entertainment - it's easy to feel apathetic, to be desensitized by everything around us. Combo (aka Culture Kidnapper) rudely awakens us by his startling images. "You take a picture, you add something that has nothing to do with it, and immediately it tells something else," he says. For Combo, cartoons allowed him to create an alternate universe or a challenging view of our reality.

"Pictures are part of our everyday life," he tells us, "we are exposed to thousands everyday and they barely mean something. By adding cartoons in the picture I chose, I want people to have a closer look at the picture than we would normally. I find it interesting to pick innocent pictures from cartoons to talk about serious and scary issues.

"The characters in the cartoons are really simple and they embody a value: it is very Manichean, there are the goodies and the baddies. The personality attributes of the characters (greed, anger, naivety...) at the same time helps the viewer get the meaning of the picture, and offers another way to read it."

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