she's so hot I wanna clean her room — © shelestvetrovki

Somewhere between voyeurism and veneration, Ukrainian artist shelestvetrovki invites us into a universe where chaos is sacred and the bedroom becomes a battleground of identity. Her project, She's So Hot I Wanna Clean Her Room, is part archive, part intervention.

At first glance, the series is exactly what it sounds like: photographs of girls in Japan posing inside their notoriously messy rooms. But look closer, and the mess becomes metaphor. Each room is a collapsed galaxy of objects with, plushies tossed like afterthoughts and manga pages frozen mid-moan. “When my room is messy and I can't find even my toothbrush I go insane," shelestvetrovki explains. “And when I go insane, I reach Buddhism.”

There’s no aesthetic neutrality here. These rooms are loud, lived-in, layered. Some lean towards the soft and hyper-feminine, others erupt with anime iconography, but all are united by a sense of unapologetic presence. shelestvetrovki also 3D scans them. The result is a digital fossil of entropy, preserved with all its chaos intact. "Girls always have so many little things," she says, "the usual camera wouldn't work here."

The idea began not with a gallery, but a childhood memory when shelestvetrovki was introduced to the daughter of her mom’s friend, or rather, her room. “I hadn't even seen you, but I already love you, K,” she remembers. “Why not express my affection through rearranging and cleaning every little corner of your girl's empire?” That early encounter, manic and tender, animates the entire project. Cleaning isn’t just caretaking; it’s obsession. It’s performance. It's love in its most frenetic, overreaching form.

Fast forward 20 years, and a memory turned into a project when shelestvetrovki was invited into the room of a Japanese friend “When the door opened, I literally thought, 'Damn bitch, you really live like that?'’ There’s something inherently meme-like in the title alone. But beyond the meme is a meditation. The series hints at how physical space mirrors mental space, how chaos can be both collapse and coping mechanism. Some rooms are clean, others not. Some girls are performers, some philosophers. "I love nasty girls and I love clean girls too," she adds.

There’s also a peculiar intimacy to the act of being invited in. In Japan, where private space is sacred, the act of letting someone into your room is weighted with trust. That these girls let a Ukrainian artist scan every inch of their personal chaos is quietly revolutionary.

Despite its humor, She's So Hot I Wanna Clean Her Room carries a cultural resonance. It's a project birthed by a Ukrainian artist in exile, now documenting girlhood in Tokyo while simultaneously preparing a wartime documentary about Gen Z in Ukraine. “Humour is probably the only possible way to go through it if you wanna stay sane,” she says. That tension between absurdity and survival threads through everything she does.

Next up, shelestvetrovki plans to publish a book compiling these 3D rooms and portraits. "The way I want to approach it is so sickkkk," she teases. We believe her. Because what she’s doing isn’t just documentation. It’s spiritual cartography. A way of mapping the messes we leave behind when we’re too busy thinking about God, crushes, or our next snack to clean up after ourselves.