"The Weight" is a participatory installation-study that I made in July, six months after the beginning of the invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine. Habituation and adaptation are very natural evolutionary processes that help a person to stay sane and survive.

The installation was made as part of the "Silence Lab” ran by Tsekh Animacii. For three days, the laboratory participants were silent.

The Weight appeared out of nowhere, in the most passable part of the factory, invading people's daily lives. Habitual movement became difficult and a field of completely new behavioral scenarios and reactions appeared. The veil of threads rapidly changed: tangled, froze, unraveled until it was completely cut off.

At that moment, the word “mobilization” had not yet been heard. I felt everything around me freeze, sink into painful silence. Memory turns on the mechanism of oblivion, anxiety becomes dull, and everything seems to be the same as before, but not at all like that.