ONUKA's Emmy travelled across years — now it heads to grandpa's workshop

ONUKA has finally received the physical Daytime Emmy statuette — for the episode Culture Quest: Ukraine, which won the “Best Daytime Special” category back in 2024. The award is now heading to Chernihiv, to her grandfather's workshop.

The artist shared this in her own video post.

The strangest part here is the route. The award was presented in Los Angeles in the summer of 2024, and it was brought to Ukraine by the musicians of DakhaBrakha, who also appear in that episode. Nata Zhyzhchenko puts it simply: the statuette travelled across the years.

What this project is

Culture Quest is an American travel series by Ian Grant for the PBS network. The hour-long Ukrainian episode was filmed in September 2022: about cultural resistance, the volunteer movement and the artistic answer to the invasion.

Alongside ONUKA, the film features Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, director general of Mystetskyi Arsenal, as well as DakhaBrakha, KAZKA, Okean Elzy and the street-art crew Paint Hunters. The award was handed out on 8 June 2024 at the 51st Daytime Creative Arts and Lifestyle Emmy Awards in Los Angeles.

“And if someone had told me that an episode filmed in this workshop would win an Emmy, and that this Emmy would come here to document the moment, I would not have believed it,” says Nata Zhyzhchenko.

The Chernihiv part was filmed at Fabrychna, 12 — in the former musical instrument workshop and family home of the Shlonchyks. The artist's grandfather, Oleksandr Shlonchyk, was an honoured folk master of Ukraine and Moldova: for more than thirty years he worked at the Chernihiv musical instrument factory, restored a torban linked to Taras Shevchenko, and made his granddaughter her first sopilka flute.

Since April 2024 the site of the workshop has been home to the public ethnographic space “Fabrychna, 12” — a joint project of the artist and Suspilne. There they print three-dimensional copies of the folk instruments her grandfather once made by hand.

“Thank you, DakhaBrakha, for carrying my statuette across the years,” ONUKA wrote.

Why this is more than an award

Nata recalls that in the autumn of 2022 the film crew was taken across the Desna by ferry — there was no road bridge back then, and the crossing ran on a timetable. The mood, she says, was completely different: everyone was waiting for the counteroffensive.

Now the golden statuette is returning to the very place where it all started — to the workshop where that first sopilka was made for her. The artist ended her post briefly: “Grandpa is happy.”

Earlier we wrote about how ONUKA prints sopilkas from recycled plastic at the “Fabrychna, 12” space — and that is exactly where the statuette is going now.