Big Orange Monster: A Tool to Survival and Self-Care at a time of Rising Authoritarianism; a Warrior to Fight Against the Big Orange Monsters of the World; and a Reminder to Hug Yourself in Difficult Times by Ric Kasini Kadour
14″x11″; collage on watercolor paper; 2025. 2025-08-05 A.
ESSAY
In the summer of 2025, after Kolaj Fest New Orleans, I went to Montreal where, among other things, we hosted the virtual launch for the book and folio, Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide. In the run-up for the launch, I had a conversation with Martin Mycielski about the dysphoria that is created by authoritarians. On the one hand, authoritarians are constantly demanding our attention, and, on the other, they are doing and saying the craziest things: renaming international bodies of water; aggressively redecorating everything; denying the clear evidence of sex trafficking networks; randomly firing government employees; directing agencies to kidnap as many people as possible; opening internment camps on wetlands; reopening long-shuttered prisons; erasing history; activating the military against its own citizens, and so on. To engage with the Oh What Now…I mean Newsfeed is both an act of bearing witness to history and a type of self-abuse that attacks one’s sense of self and place. The monster feeds on chaos and is counting on us to destabilize ourselves because in that moment, they can steal our power.
Our work in Folklore has taught me that irrational thinking can be powerful medicine in irrational times. I don’t think we are capable of understanding and responding to the totality of what is happening, but we can draw a line around it. This is how Folklore works. The unspoken mysteries of the world–the things we don’t understand–are personified by magical creatures, something we don’t need to fully understand to respond to. We cannot control the weather, but we can pray to a Sky Goddess. We cannot explain the eerie sounds coming across the field at night, but we can attribute it to Ghosts of the Vale. Dafna Steinberg describes the ghosts of murdered women as the unresolved trauma of a community, unable to make sense of the violence. In this sense, Big Orange Monster is an exercise in contemporary folklore: a place to park our anxieties and ease the dysphoria brought on by the disturbing things authoritarians do and say. This is not a solution to authoritarianism. It is an act of self-care. The solution to authoritarianism is survival. It is small acts of resistance; community engagement; mutual aid and protection; and the practice of defiant memory. Authoritarianism takes hold because, in the chaos it creates, we forget the lessons of history; how a democracy should function; our sense of decency and morality.
Before I issued the Call to Artists, I set about to make my own Big Orange Monster. The first was misshapen and angry with a pointy hat and menacing eyes. It wasn’t bad, just not the monster I wanted. The second, I made rounder. I gave him four legs and two arms that reached upwards as if it wanted to be picked up. I gave him fangs, but I left the eyes neutral black shapes pointing in different directions. A monster can be anything. A monster can be the thing we fear or the fear we feel. It can be what makes us angry or our own anger. A monster can be a threat, but it can also be a protector. It can be a person, an idea, a technology, or a possibility, like the darkness under the bed or an open closet door. When you get to thinking about monsters, childhood eventually comes up. I think that is because monsters are about our basic instincts, those deeply rooted ways of thinking about and being in the world. Monsters are primal and they bring out the primal in us. Monsters can make us monsters if we let them.
EXHIBITION
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Big Orange Monster: An Emergency Collage Exhibition
Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans
10 September to 18 October 2025
Demonstrating how collage is a 21st Century Art Movement, artists sent 128 collages from 13 countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States. Nine artists from New Orleans contributed works to the exhibition. We ask visitors to the gallery to take care and not feed the monsters, some of which have been installed behind a protective iron gate for everyone’s safety.
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