Fragile Home

This room-sized mixed-reality experience by Ukrainian artist Victoria Lopukhina and Czech artist Ondřej Moravec (whose thematically related VR piece Fresh Memories: The Look was part of IDFA 2023) makes tangible the feeling of everything—your home, your foundations, your grip on life—suddenly becoming fragile.

The idea is to explore the mixed reality of Fragile Home in your own living room, so at IDFA we’ve set up a room containing a table, sofa, windows and so on. Walking around in this physical space, you’ll see virtual Ukrainian elements appear, such as borscht on the table, family photos on the wall, and a couch with multicolored cushions and a cat that wants to be petted.

You go through several stages in this peaceful domestic environment, accompanied by the sound of melancholy polyphonic Ukrainian folk songs. The first thing to disrupt the calm is politics, in the form of newspapers, pamphlets and new photos of the family at the Euromaidan demonstrations in 2013. Then comes the devastating war and the decision not to flee but to work on recovery. This emotional mixed-reality work becomes a microcosm of the national home: Ukraine.