Ornament is Crime, created in collaboration with Ilinca Manolache,
film, 12'42", 2025

Another one of their long standing interests is the haunting presence and ideological resonance of architecture constructed by political regimes. In their recent
film Ornament is Crime (2025) they bring Bobitza - a satiric alter ego avatar from the nowadays globalized manosphere - to Budapest. Bobitza, a character Romanian
actress Ilinca Manolache has been developing since 2020 on Instagram and Tik Tok, spouts a running commentary of Andrew-Tate-style machismo, nationalist grandiosity,
sexual innuendo, and plenty of profanity. In the film, Bobitza visits Viktor Orban’s restorationist renovation of the Habsburg era Buda Castle and other sites
beloved of Hungarian nationalists. The obsession with ornament and the yearning for the trappings of empire, past and future, are called out with reference to Austrian
architect Adolf Loos’s 1910 lecture on ornament (tweaked in the film’s title), as Bobitza considers the appalling economic cost of such charismatic frippery. But that’s
not all: Bobitza’s wild metanarrative draws parallels as wide-ranging as the historical continuity between Second World War Romanian fascism, the Ceausescu regime, MAGA,
and Elon Musk’s fantasy to travel to Mars. This far-flung tapestry is further peppered with serious reference to philosopher Georges Bataille’s writings on architecture
and terror and Walter Benjamin’s concept of history as a whirlpool. The madness continues. (Jill Winder)