Who Wouldn't Embrace 'Thorn Bouquets' to Prove Their Love?

Driven by artful AI, this Brazilian Valentine's Day message cuts deep

The timeless notion that love hurts—sometime a lot—informs “Disarrangements,” a supremely spiky initiative from creative studio PAPOCO timed to Brazil’s Valentine’s Day on June 12.

Developed with botanical artists at Mesa & Flor, this (literal and figurative) passion project focuses not on gorgeous flowers, but various types of thorns as its central metaphor. They’re brittle, alluring and razor sharp throughout an art-house exercise lensed with a surreal, euro-horror aesthetic by filmmaker Alexandre Kazuo Kubo.

“Our project bypasses the generic, sugar-coated tropes that usually pollute Valentine’s Day,” Bruno Pereira, copywriter, creative director and co-founder of PAPOCO, tells Muse. “We wanted to offer a brutally honest perspective on romance. Ultimately, much like nature itself, human relationships have their thorny seasons. The true beauty of commitment lies in the willingness to sustain that love and flourish together during the hardest days.”

“The ultimate goal,” he says, “is to feel and evoke feeling.”

The hero film breaks today across YouTube and elsewhere. Strap in for 90 seconds of prickly, pointed frames that slice straight to (and perhaps through) the heart:

Poetic narration, penned by Pereira, puts the visceral visuals in perspective:

I offer you my thorns
My wounds,
The unspoken words,
This broken garden
I carry deep within
my chest…

I offer you my thorns,
My tears,
The aches that made a home
out of my body.
This scar where every day
my sun goes down…

A toast to the couples who,
through pain and silence,
still choose the same soil.
Because to love is to embrace
each other’s thorns.

There’s a novel IRL element, too, in the form of a “Resilience Test” on the campaign website. Users are invited to press and hold a single key on their keypad—until it hurts, basically—mimicking the experience of holding a thorn. The top 5 finishers will win thorny bouquets from acclaimed floral artist Tanus Saab.

Below, the PAPOCO creatives behind the project share their insights:

MUSE: What message are you trying to communicate—and why?

Bruno Pereira: True intimacy inherently carries friction and vulnerability. Relationships weather storms; harsh words can wound. Every long-term commitment harbors quiet deserts and grey days. All of this is part of loving someone. Love is beautifully fractured, and that’s okay. Everyone—without exception—carries thorns.

For instance, I often wake up and retreat into my own silence. I can be grumpy. Post-pandemic, I realized I am far more anxious than I ever used to be. These are just a few of my own thorns. They are part of who I am and how I relate to others. When you look inward, how many thorns do you see piercing through your own gestures, habits, and emotional wounds?

What inspired this project in the first place? What do you hope to achieve for PAPOCO?

Erick Mendonça (creative director and co-founder): We are all industry veterans who spent years leading creative departments at top agency networks. But recently, we stopped identifying with the bureaucratic processes and traditional structures of those environments. We chose an ironically thorny path—building an independent studio—but one that is infinitely more honest, agile, and aligned with our creative standards.

We saw Brazil’s unique Valentine’s Day (“Dia dos Namorados”) as the perfect testing ground to invest our energy into the kind of raw storytelling we believe in.

We took the most overused, idealized symbol of romance—the flower bouquet—and stripped it of its traditional softness. We subverted it into something that goes far beyond a seasonal gift. We transformed it into a deeply personal, raw reflection of human reality: our thorns.

How exactly was this made? What’s real vs. tech-generated?

Bruno Pereira: The film is almost entirely a hyper-curated AI production, designed to push the absolute limits of cinematic craft and digital art direction.

The conceptual thorn bouquets designed by Mesa & Flor were physically captured in a photo studio to be seamlessly embedded among the scenes, ensuring a visceral, tangible texture throughout. And the ultra-rare physical sculptures were masterfully created by Tanus Saab to be delivered to the winners’ homes.

But the cinematic narrative was conceptualized by director Kazuo Kubo using an array of AI tools.

Fittingly, the film runs hot and cold, as it were. Red, blazing moments mix with sequences of desiccation.

Bruno Pereira: Because the core narrative is so raw and poetic, we needed that visceral weight to translate seamlessly into the imagery. The poetry had to exist beyond the words. Kazuo, whose visual craft is exceptional, perfectly captured our intent and injected that precise emotional tension into every frame. When you watch the film, the seamless textures make you forget you are looking at AI. It feels real because it stings. It’s a thorn disguised as cinema.

When people take the “Resilience Test,” what do you hope they’ll think and feel

Yuri Facioli (copywriter, creative director and partner): We want them to endure. The physical, living sculptures that will be delivered to the challenge winners … (use) the exact botanical species featured in the film. Unlike traditional flower bouquets, these thorn structures don’t wither. They don’t die. They are permanent pieces of high-end art that will live in people’s homes forever. They inhabit eternity. The underlying question we are posing is: “How much friction are you willing to endure for your own forever?”

By forcing users to press and hold down a digital thorn, we are creating a frictional UX metaphor for the act of loving itself. It’s an opportunity to not just witness a concept, but to physically interact with it and feel the digital tension. Loving hurts. Loving demands presence. Loving requires sacrifice. Loving is, ultimately, choosing to accept the other person’s thorns.”