Lego Violence

Legofesto

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Warning: "This is not a blog for children."

That's according to the mission statement of the blogger Legofesto, who's amazingly found a way to use LEGO — the stackable, clickable, infinitely malleable children's toys — to tell the story of Guantanamo Bay detainees, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, British bank instability, and civilian deaths in the Iraq War. Legofesto, a blogger located in the United Kingdom, won't reveal her identity, but her politics are clear. According to the profile on her blog, she's "a politics-junkie and news-hound, with a obsession for lego and other construction toys ... She is very, very pissed off about how this War on Terror is being prosecuted by US/UK." (And she's careful to point out that the company LEGO does not endorse her use of their ubiquitous blocks.) (See pictures of life inside Guantanamo.)

But use them she does — to their fullest political protest potential. (Real Warning: Although these images are made completely out of LEGOs, they are disturbing.) Legofesto posts her creations on a blog and Flickr page. Who knew there were so many different LEGO accessories and facial expressions? There's a Gitmo prisoner strapped to a stretcher wearing a black hood — made out of LEGOs. There's a detainee getting waterboarded — by LEGO figurines. There's President Bush declaring "Missing Accomplished" — standing at a LEGO podium. "By using toys, I hope the viewer will linger longer over the image and think again about what is actually being depicted or described, in a visual language that is recognized by us all: LEGO," wrote Legofesto in an e-mail.

The juxtaposition of ubiquitous plastic toys and brutal violence may seem downright strange, but there's something eerily familiar about LEGOs that brings issues like waterboarding into sharp focus. Says Legofesto: "The incongruity between the immoral and horrific acts and events depicted and the smiley-faced childrens' toy creates a tension." Legofesto says she decided to recreate images of torture and violence out of LEGOs due to the reluctance of media organizations to publish enough actual, real-life images of what she views as criminal acts. The images range from the death of a protester at the recent G-20 meeting in London to the alleged rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl.

"I made do with what I had at hand. A big box of my old LEGO from childhood, some newer pieces of my boy's and access to a lot of images and testimony of human rights abuses to use as source material," explains Legofesto. Of course, torture is not a game, which may be why using toys to illustrate such violence is so horrific.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.