March 10, 2022
Special Edition "Rabia" by Bastiaan Woudt for Ukraine
Here at 1605 Publishers, we believe that art has the power to change the world. We are not born with equal opportunities. However, art is a tool that can provide these opportunities for those who need them. Art gives everyone light in the darkest times. It is a tool for resilience and the most expressive act of resistance.
We all know about the recent invasion of Ukraine and the injustice and violence its people are currently going through. In our team, we have a Ukrainian member, Alex Blanco who is extremely worried about her friends and family in Odesa, the city in the Southern part of Ukraine, right on the Black Sea coast.
It is difficult to help from a distance, however, it is possible. Especially if our instrument is art.
Therefore, we are donating the revenue from the sales of the first 10 prints of the Special Edition "Rabia" by Bastiaan Woudt to the volunteers of Odesa Food Market with whom Alex has a direct connection.
Odesa Food Market used to host hipster food stands with falafel wraps and flat whites but now became a face of the resistance of the city. The owners of the place transformed themselves into volunteers who raise money for the City Defence Forces essential kits (clothes, medicine, hygiene items, drinking water and food) and cook warm meals for the people who fled from bombed cities like Kharkiv and Kyiv and found their refuge in Odesa.
"The city, like the food market, has been transformed by war. From an unsentimental place reluctant to take sides, it is now adorned in yellow and blue. Ukrainian flags fly from every street corner, from cars, from apartments. The city’s diverse populations—intellectuals, gangsters, artists, workers—are pulling together ahead of the expected attack. Young volunteers pack sandbags at the beach. Engineers at the tram depot make anti-tank “hedgehogs” from old bits of rail. Some of these barricades have been installed on Deribasovskaya Street, Odessa's central boulevard, and around the nearby opera house and municipal buildings. As bloggers have noted, the scene has more in common with black-and-white prints from the second world war than it does with the reality of just two weeks ago." - The Economist