artisterror: "I was born and raised in the Urals. In our home, like in many other homes across the USSR, there were cast-iron figurines from the famous Kasli casting. Don Quixote, The Horseman, The Turtle, The Dog, and a Little Elephant.

The elephant was my favorite. As a child, I loved reading adventure books. In the works of Louis Boussenard and Henry Rider Haggard, elephants seemed to me the most exotic animals. It felt like I would never visit the distant lands where they lived. But there, on the shelf, stood my very own little elephant.

These memories are some of the coziest from my childhood. That little elephant is one of the few things I took with me when I was forced to emigrate from Russia due to my anti-war stance.

But now, when I hear the word "elephant," only one elephant comes to mind—a green one. An anti-war one. The film The Green Elephant by director Svetlana Baskova is a countercultural phenomenon for my generation and a powerful anti-war manifesto. So powerful that it is now banned in Russia.

My work The Green Elephant is both a reminder of a lost home and a reflection of how ordinary, everyday things have become colored by war today."