On January 20, 2026, David Lynch would have turned eighty. One year after his passing, the imagery he shaped still seeps into our dreams—and above all into our nightmares), like a presence that never truly left the screen. That’s why CHEAP returns to the streets of Bologna with ICONS Directed by David Lynch, the second chapter of the ongoing ICONS project, devoted to our compulsive need to celebrate, mourn, and fetishize lost icons.

It’s a call for posters that gathered 431 submissions from 14 countries, with 77 selected and pasted up for a month between Bologna’s historic center and its surrounding hills. The result is a choral, fragmented portrait that moves through comics, illustration, photography, graphic design, and mixed media, turning urban space into a mental landscape.

Across the posters, faces, atmospheres, and obsessions that shaped entire generations resurface: the uneasy velvets of Blue Velvet, the passionate drift of Wild at Heart, the unsettling visions of Eraserhead, the aching humanity of The Elephant Man, the doubles and splits of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, all the way to the expanded universe of Twin Peaks. Fragments of a filmography that isn’t merely quoted, but inhabited—reworked, disturbed, once again.

CHEAP doesn’t just stage a commemoration—it brings a public grief into the streets, turning it into a shared obsession, a visual material ready to flare up again.