GIANT - ROOTS

Giant & Roots: A Chronicle from Isolation to a Collective Identity (2020 – ongoing) This work is one continuous visual timeline of performative self-portraits. It documents a brutal evolution: how an intimate, isolated study of a single body is violently forced into becoming a manifesto of collective survival. Chapter I: Giant (2020–2022) The first chapter was a physical, animal reaction to the claustrophobia of the pandemic lockdowns. I took my 160-kilogram body, stripped it bare, and forced it into the empty landscape. Back then, home felt safe. The outside world was just a void. My flesh functioned as a clumsy, vulnerable sculpture. I was completely alone with my massive size, using my sheer physical weight to argue with the empty space around me and test my own limits. Chapter II: Roots (2022–ongoing) In 2022, the full-scale invasion smashed that isolation. My home in Mykolaiv became a target. The second chapter records this violent pivot. My body stopped being just mine. It became a heavy physical carrier of our identity, digging into the scarred soil. I physically dragged myself through the reality of the destroyed Kakhovka dam on the Southern Bug. I tied my flesh with 100-year-old family rushnyks — the rough, ancient fabric literally binding me to the dead and the living. After the horrors of Bucha, I visually stitched my own skin in the frame. I stopped being a solitary giant; I became a single, heavy cell of a massive collective organism resisting destruction. This project cannot be divided. It shows the exact moment a solitary man is crushed by history and forced to carry the brutal weight of collective identity on his own bare shoulders.