War exists in two registers that seem to cancel each other out. One is abstract, made of statistics, maps and strategies; the other is brutally concrete: death, ecocide, wounded bodies, trauma passed down through generations. Eduard Constantin’s practice builds a third space between these extremes, where cold figures take on a tangible form, and violence can be thought through without being reproduced. His refusal of the explicit, visceral image is a deliberate strategy against the trivialisation of death in a visual culture already saturated with it.

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The works rely on quiet displacements. A piece of military gear is wrapped in and “domesticated” with the use of a household textile; a number becomes an accumulation of gestures repeated by hand to the point of exhaustion; a map of military operations is lifted from its territory and turned into an alluring drawing; coloured ice rockets melt into one another, leaving traces that overlap endlessly. Fragile, ephemeral or intimate materials such as paper, ice, macramé and ink pull against the overwhelming scale of the subject, exposing the vulnerability that lies beneath any rhetoric of force.

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Constantin returns again and again to historical memory and to the ways this memory is shaped and handed down. The history we are taught is still largely one of battles, treaties and redrawn borders, in which the victims survive only as numbers too large to grasp. His works do not claim to make war easier to understand. Instead, they try to close the distance we keep from it, the very detachment on which (ultra)nationalist movements and the aestheticisation of conflict are built.