In 1980s Wrocław, a Polish underground movement called Orange Alternative took to the streets in dwarf hats, handing out sanitary pads and staging absurdist happenings — because direct anti-communist protest had become impossible, and impossibility had to be answered with something.

Twenty years later and four thousand kilometres east, in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, artist Artyom Loskutov and his friends launched Monstration — an annual procession that looked exactly like a political rally, except the slogans made no sense. People marched carrying banners that read "Hell is Ours!", "Return the Sun to Its Place!", "Back to the Factory with Us All".

The form has since travelled further — reactivated at the Alytus Biennial in Lithuania (2009–2015) and picked up in other cities and countries whenever the political air grew thick enough to need it.

What connects these very different moments across half a century is a shared discovery: when direct political speech becomes difficult, exhausting, dangerous, or simply meaningless, irony and absurdity can carry what plain words no longer can. This is a language many of us — in the US, in Georgia, in Serbia, in Iran, in Israel, in Myanmar, in Russia — are speaking again, right now. What started as local jokes in Poland and Siberia turned out to be a translation key for something a lot of us are living through.