Mihai Grecu

Melonland immerses viewers in a universe where the watermelon, omnipresent in Romanian summers, becomes the seed of a parallel world. Starting from this ordinary yet symbolically rich fruit, the work reinvents landscapes, architectures, objects, and situations as fragments of a collective dream. The images, generated and recomposed using AI models, shift between humor, poetry, and uncanny strangeness.

The project explores how a simple fruit can become an identity marker, a mythological motif, or a cultural mirror. Each image questions what we project onto visual symbols: rural traditions, popular imagination, beliefs, and the contemporary tensions amplified by social media.

Melonland also engages with the notion of post-truth: how an image, even an absurd one, can be interpreted in countless ways depending on personal narratives or emotions. AI becomes a revealer of collective fantasies, a “shared dream” where reality and fiction contaminate each other.

By blending folklore, pop aesthetics, surrealism, and viral visual culture, the work reflects on our current era—one in which symbols circulate faster than their meaning, and where a simple fruit can turn into a political sign, a cultural projection, or a new myth. Melonland is at once parody, emerging mythology, and a laboratory exploring how images shape our beliefs.