The workshop in Odesa on 20 December 2025, in the aftermath of a mass Russian drone attack on the region. Left without electricity after strikes crippled the city’s energy infrastructure, the studio also lay within the direct impact zone. Its survival — and the preservation of the artist’s workplace — was owed to a narrow, almost miraculous margin.
Art Created While the Bombs Fall
Statement by MFF
I do not work in conditions suitable for art.
I work in conditions suitable only for survival.
There are moments when creation takes place not beside life, but directly against it — when the floor is still covered with tools thrown down by the shockwave, when the wall bears a fresh wound, when electricity is absent and time itself seems suspended between two explosions.
This is not metaphor. This is not a dramatic posture.
This is the physical environment in which my work exists.
Art is often discussed as choice, freedom, privilege.
Here, it is closer to endurance.
We work when the city is dark. We work when the air defence sirens interrupt thought. We work knowing that the next strike may erase not only the sculpture, but the hands shaping it. And yet we continue — not out of heroism, but because stopping would mean surrendering meaning itself.
I do not create under bombs to prove resilience.
I create because destruction must not be allowed the final word.
These sculptures are born not from comfort, nor from safety, nor from contemplation. They are assembled piece by piece, in darkness, from fragments of weapons meant to kill — transformed by human hands into forms that insist on dignity, memory, and life.
To those who create meaning, who hold the blow, who preserve dignity and continue real work even in darkness — literal and metaphorical — this labour needs no justification.
It exists because it must.
