Remember Olek? An amazingly talented artist, specializing in crochet. Olek got a bit explosive this time around. There’s a video, and it is a very powerful one, and it might well trigger some people, so read first, and then decide if you want to watch.

In the Blink of an Eye consists of a 19th-century Swedish home crocheted by Olek and a team of assistants that was literally blown to pieces before it was shown to the public. No one but Olek and her team witnessed what the pre-destroyed building looked like, although the artist produced a video of the building while it was still intact and filled with crocheted furniture, decorations, and light fixtures, leading up to the moment of pure explosive destruction.

Olek isn’t a nihilist or looking to make a statement of artistic disownment by burning her own works…In fact, the artist didn’t originally intend to blow-up the work at all. “I had originally intended to just recreate a traditional Swedish home. It was the summer of 2015 and the refugee crisis had started to explode,” Olek explains to The Creators Project. “Since I always work with assistants, I asked the museum to help me get connected with refugees who might need work.”

This proved to be a turning point in the artist’s project: “After a couple days of crocheting, sewing, and listening to music from various countries and audiobooks, me and the refugee assistants broke ice and a conversation started that changed me forever. It is one thing to read about the events in those parts of the world, but it is something totally different to actually look in the eyes of those women who lost everything while running from the war,” the artist reveals.

“These women not only lost their physical home due to the war conflict, but also lost the feeling of home as their families got separated. The idea of exploding the house became clearer and clearer to me,” Olek adds. “Lama’s husband, who had been helping us quite often, brought me a folder with many photographs from their hometown, including their own house and other homes before and after explosions, which served as a source of inspiration for me.”

The Creators Project has the full story.