What started out with an art student selling t-shirts to raise money for Darfur is taking even more twisted turns as of lately. In 2007 Nadia Plesner started an art project to raise awareness on Darfur. In her own words:
“As I was reading the book “Not on our watch” by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, I felt horrified by the fact that even with the genocide and other ongoing atrocities in Darfur, Paris Hilton’s prison insident was the one story getting all the attention.
Is it possible that show business has outruled common sense?”

She named the project “simple living” after Paris Hilton’s reality tv-show and drew a child in Darfur holding a similar dog and hand bag as Hilton. She then put the print on t-shirts for sale to raise money for Darfur. The t-shirts were an online success. And she was contacted by Louis Vuitton. But not to offer to help her with the campaign, instead asking her to stop it as they felt the bag in the drawing was a violation of their copyrights. In response, she posted their letter on her webpage and continued her sales, but after a hefty lawsuit and tons of media attention, she eventually started using a new drawing to focus on the campaign instead of court.

Now, three years later she has been convicted in a second court case where she was sued by Louis Vuitton. This time it’s about her artwork Darfurnica (after Picasso’s Guernica) that includes the original drawing of the child in Darfur in the middle of the painting. She has been sentenced to pay 5000 euro per day that she continues to show the painting (since Jan 28). Ironically, at the same time, Nadia Plesner herself was packing a new container with medical equipment for Darfur. And she has gotten Darfur back in the media.