Gender & Space // Mykola Shandra: Soft Ammunition - Learning Power Through Play

Within patriarchal systems, conflict is repeatedly addressed through demonstrations of power—control, dominance, and the ability to prevail. This logic rarely appears as a clear instruction. Instead, it seeps into everyday life and shapes how bodies learn to move, compete, and assert themselves.

In post-conflict and post-authoritarian environments, childhood spaces often function as informal training grounds for this logic. Through play, repetition, and imitation, power relations are absorbed well before they can be articulated. Improvised objects—assembled from clothespins, elastic bands, sticks, and fragments—occupy an unstable zone between toy and weapon. They are not representations of violence; they are closer to its rehearsal, its testing, its early calibration.

The object presented in this installation emerges directly from this condition. The transformed clothespin is intentionally small, almost negligible in scale, insisting that the mechanisms it refers to do not require spectacle to function. It reflects how patriarchal approaches to resolving conflict—force instead of care, dominance instead of negotiation—become embedded in material culture and daily practice. Architecture and domestic space are not neutral backdrops in this process; they quietly structure visibility, hierarchy, and proximity, shaping who acts and who adapts.

Gender is approached here not as identity but as training: who learns to aim, who learns to endure, who is permitted to act, and who is expected to adjust. By following these dynamics through space and object, the work considers how patriarchy sustains itself through childhood education, play, and forms of normalization that are so familiar they often pass unnoticed.