Patrix is the ideal prototype of unified citizens for a warring state. The goal of standardization is to create the ideal archetypal warrior in wartime, the bearer of sacrificial citizenship. The first victims of such processes are always the diversity of experiences and conflicting identities.

 

During the years of the Russian Federation's full-scale war against Ukraine, the state and society prioritize invincibility among other social values. It is elevated to the level of a civic cult, requiring Ukrainians to be resilient, boundless motivation, almost supernatural abilities to recover, and uncompromising dedication to defending the country.

 

The public display of opposing qualities – weakness, fear, fatigue, an embittered sense of (in)justice – is interpreted by society itself as defeatism, desertion and betrayal. This gap between the imposed expectation of collective invincibility and individual fragility creates a distance between civilians and military personnel. The expectation of the former from the latter is maintained by the state through a variety of disciplinary, biopolitical and even necropolitical measures.

 

The technology of manufacturing the project's serial objects reproduces this set of measures, in accordance with the conventional value of "unbreakability". Filling the mold with clay, eliminating defects, a series of firings in the kiln and slip unification repeatedly reproduce the prototype of the public expectation of the patrix.

 

The installation of replicated objects demonstrates the vertical view of society and the state on the Ukrainian military: parade formations, iconography of daily losses, markings of military formations on maps of the General Staff, identical rows of fresh tombstones in military cemeteries.

 

This distance, if not a gap, is what society tries to overcome with a formed ritual of honoring its heroes, a normative ideological vocabulary, and a symbolic price for human life, in a situation where all bodies belong to the state. But does it work? How many times have we looked away from prosthetic soldiers? How often has the sincere gratitude in your head for a stranger in uniform sounded false? How much longer will your arguments against evading mobilization last?