Its age?
Its material?
Or our perception of its value?

There’s a bench in my parents’ house. It’s almost a hundred years old. They inherited it from my grandparents. Over the years, it has weathered many winters and many coats of paint.When I was a child, it was just an ordinary bench. It was always there. It had been there for so long that it was easy to stop noticing it. That often happens with objects.

I knew that everything had to start with this very bench.
The hardest part turned out to be another question.
How could it become part of a new object?
Not to reinterpret it, but to capture what already exists.
Not the object itself.
What makes it recognizable.
While working on the exhibition for the “Charter” team, I considered the Cossack coat of arms as one of the possible exhibits.
Its description included one detail: the base was nearly two hundred years younger. It had been replaced at some point to preserve what remained.

After that, I remembered another bench. During its restoration, I had noticed that some of its parts had been replaced long before my time. At the time, I didn’t think much of it.

As I began researching Ukrainian benches, I started to notice how different they looked. Among them, I found myself returning more and more often to the bench from my parents’ house. Its backrest, in particular, turned out to be surprisingly atypical. It featured an alternation of straight, smooth, and sharp transitions—at times somewhat aggressive. The longer I looked at it, the more I began to notice not only the shape itself but also the outlines of the pieces of wood that had once been separated from it.

I don’t know if a single object can change one’s attitude toward old things.
But perhaps the next time you come across an old bench, chest, or table, you’ll pause to take a closer look.
You’ll notice the carvings.
The holes.
The details that seemed random.