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Cyborg Dolphin Tears

Category

2025

Book

Awarded

Designer / Designers / Design Studio / Agency

Client

Year

Andrei Șendrea, Mălin Neamțu

Mihai Barabancea

2024

Printing House

Print Run

Number of Pages

Format (W × H)

Publisher

ISBN

Everest

800

272

165 × 215 mm

Vellant

978‑973‑0‑40473‑9

Other Credits

Nicoleta Radu

Short description

Long description

Cyborg Dolphin Tears is a surreal photobook by Mihai Barabancea blending Balkan futurism, glitch aesthetics, and analog-punk visuals. Shot over five years in Romania and Moldova, it explores dystopian landscapes, techno-folklore, and fragmented identities in a post-truth world.

Cyborg Dolphin Tears is a dystopian photobook by Romanian artist Mihai Barabancea that blurs the lines between documentary, performance, and staged fiction. Shot over five years across Romania and Moldova, the project captures a decaying post-socialist landscape fused with elements of Balkan futurism, analog-punk textures, and glitch aesthetics. The result is a hallucinatory visual journey where folklore, urban decay, and speculative technology collide.

Through over 180 photographs printed in CMYK + silver on high-grade Novatech paper, the book explores themes of identity, surveillance, ritual, and disinformation in the digital age. A key visual element is the silver layer integrated into the printing process, which appears ghostly and iridescent—evoking a sense of nanorobotic contamination. This shimmering effect gives the images a spectral presence, as if infected by a technological virus or haunted by future decay, subtly altering how each page is perceived depending on the light and angle.

Figures appear as cyborgs, mutants, or mythical beings—half-human, half-machine—moving through fragmented environments that feel both archaic and futuristic. Each image resists clear interpretation, offering instead a poetic and unsettling look at how truth fractures in an era defined by spectacle and distortion.

Designed by Shentzu Studio and published in a limited edition of 800 copies by Vellant, the book’s aesthetic is both rough and refined—melding 35 mm film grain with digital interventions. Cyborg Dolphin Tears offers a powerful meditation on the psychological and cultural effects of collapse and transformation, viewed through a distinctly Eastern European lens. It is not just a photobook, but a speculative document of a parallel reality—both imagined and all hyper-real.

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Foto: Mihai Ciobanu

Jury Notes

Process Notes: Studio Shentzu

We believe this is a true artist’s book, an object in itself. Everything about it feels strong — the design, the concept, and the production come together in a very original way. The design reflects the content intriguingly, while the silver treatment of the photographs makes them stand out. The richness of the black background allows the images to blend beautifully, almost like collages, creating a work that is solid, intriguing, and very well crafted.

 

PV: It's an object. It's a proper artist book. You really have an object in your hand.

 

JG: Everything about this one was strong. The design was strong, the concept was interesting. The production and the combination of everything was original. 
The design reflected the content in an interesting way. It's intriguing and just a solid piece of work. And the photos are interesting and they've been treated in an interesting way with the silver.

 

ML: It's very rich. It's a book, nice and black, so it has a black background, and one makes it really rich. And the layout of the images and photographs, the way they blend into the black background is just really amazing. It looked like collage, but it's not.

Thinking about the journey from initial idea to the finished piece, which moments had the deepest impact on the project and what made you realise those changes had to happen?

Starting with the initial idea that reflects the dialog with the client, the main challenge is scaling down to reasonable production and materialisation costs. During the process, the moment with the deepest impact on the outcome can sometimes be adjusting the production cost within the client’s budget.

Collaboration is built on trust and dialogue — within that process, which part of the project feels most authentically yours, and which unexpected voices pushed you beyond your comfort zone?

Trust and dialogue within collaborations is key. During our process, every time we start by reevaluating our skills and what could be valuable for the project. This means we can push our technical and conceptual boundaries every time, delivering fresh graphic and conceptual results. The level of complexity that comes with some projects can push us beyond our comfort zone, but simple and playful projects can do that too.

In what ways do you believe awards like LDA shape (or should shape) the design landscape locally? And is there a responsibility attached to being an awarded designer within that ecosystem?

Initiatives like LDA help the local design scene by empowering the desire for improvement and growth for established and upcoming designers. Being awarded at LDA, only makes us want to push our practice further by keeping the quality of design as high as possible and strengthening the bonds within our local design community.

When designing for a book as an object, what were the material or tactile decisions (paper stock, binding structure, format) that made the difference between something “nice” and something you believe will last?

The Cyborg Dolphin Tears publication reflects Mihai Barabancea’s views and practice and is a true editorial embodiment of his practice. Every design decision was led and discussed with the author and this is a project where limitations were current technology.

How did you balance the informal elements and the visual impact? Which one led the process and why?

The photos selected for the book pushed the design language and materiality of the publication. Separating the content from the design language in this project was not an option. The dark societal underbelly sci-fi theme of the content had to reflect in the every design decision of the book.

Books carry production constraints (print run, budget, distribution). How did those practical limits influence the design — were there compromises that became strengths?

As fore mentioned, in this project the only limitation imposed was current technology and production methods. Such an elaborate story telling and symbolism of the selected material used in the book push the design language to be a strong support factor for the content. Given the overall theme of the book, the only “limitation” was using a silver PANTONE for highlighting various elements and details of the images. This became a core visual feature throughout the book.

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