Kherson became one of the places where French artist Alexandre Anri collected war-damaged items for his series of sculptures made from furniture that survived Russian shelling. For their restoration the artist used metal melted down from Russian rockets.
This is reported by Ukrainska Pravda. Life, citing Dezeen.
Alexandre Anri worked on the project for two years and called it Light Into Darkness (“Light in Darkness”).
Visiting destroyed areas, including Izyum, Kharkiv and Kherson, Anri found chairs, doors and window frames that survived the shelling. He calls these items “silent witnesses” that bear “invisible traces of the war”. In total he managed to collect about a dozen such objects.
DEZEEN.COM
At the same time the artist collected casings and fragments of Russian rockets — it was these that he melted down into metal from which he created “prosthetics for furniture”. According to him, the same metal that was used for destruction now becomes part of the restoration.
Anri spent three months in Kyiv, where he worked in a studio on the final part of the project.
The series of sculptures was presented for the first time at Dutch Design Week 2025. The exhibition included two wooden dining chairs with cast aluminum inserts, doors with explosion marks mounted on a base made of melted-down casings, as well as two window frames that were part of the installation “Walls Remember” featuring portraits of Ukrainians on fragments of destroyed buildings.