The project “POPUSHILLI SMO STE SU – Filter46 – Posters Video” is a multimedia conceptual video exhibition of posters and graphic design exploring the visual identity, packaging and branding of the tobacco industry in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1990. Through digital post-painting, it recontextualises historical cigarette packs as distinctive 20th-century design icons, examining a graphic language strongly influenced by Constructivism, Suprematism and Neoplasticism.

The project directly responds to the festival theme “Friction”. Within Yugoslavia’s centralised yet regionally decentralised economic model, competition was not purely commercial. Typography, brand names such as Drina, Morava and Jadran, and packaging design reflected tensions between centralism and autonomy, unity and nationalism, and local and state patriotism.

Cigarette packaging thus functioned as a miniature political poster carried in every citizen’s pocket. Historical graphic design becomes a medium for revealing social fractures and ideological conflict, showing how political friction materialised through everyday visual communication and left behind an aesthetic legacy after both the state and the industry had turned to “ash and smoke”.