Bucha by Denis Music

Brooch / Conceptual Geometric

The buyer of the brooch is asked to make a donation to Superhumans Center - a state-of-the-art war victim rehabilitation center for adults and children in Ukraine. The sum to be donated should be decided by the buyer.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, like millions of Ukrainians, I was forced to leave my home. I lost my home and workshop and created this brooch using non-jewellery tools and materials I had at that moment. It symbolizes salvation from stupor and the beginning of my personal resistance to this war. This brooch was born after the liberation of Bucha from the Russian occupiers. Ukrainian soldiers found the first mass burial site of Ukrainian victims. Photographs of graves and an endless field of crosses were seen by the whole world. Then Irpin, Mariupol, and many, many Ukrainian cities followed. Each cross in this brooch is a destroyed life, millions of lives. But embroidery, with the help of a cross, seems to transform a terrible reality into hope for the future. When my son saw this pattern, he asked: Dad, are these stars? Yes, in every cross we can see the stars and the hope. Hope that we lose this war only when we die. And it is hoped that gives us the strength to live, to defeat all the evil that is around us. That is why I chose cross-stitch embroidery, an ancient Ukrainian technique, to create brooches. I made the basis of a tin box containing my son’s lollipops. The box is a symbol of the fact that the adult Russian world stole children of their peaceful childhood; and that adults should be held accountable for this to the full extent of the law.