Missor ended his schooling the day he was legally allowed to do so. French and seventeen, he decided there was nothing the modern world had to teach him. He exited the system and the era he refused to be shaped by.

Seventeen years later, he is a self-taught sculptor and a bootstrapped entrepreneur vying to build a Prometheus of titanium for the launchpads of Starbase. While the West tears down its heroes and forgets its Gods, the Atelier Missor is forging them anew.

Symbols are power. They are not just decorations, but also instruments of memory and anchors of identity.

Across the West, these ties are being severed. In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, protestors dragged down monuments to Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, daubing their pedestals in red and cheering their collapse. On the occasion of King Charles’ birthday in 2024, the bronze head of King George V was sliced off in Melbourne. In London’s Parliament Square, once a rallying point during the Blitz, the statue of Winston Churchill had to be boxed in behind steel walls to protect it from mobs hungry to spray paint it with smears. Across America, monuments to Lincoln, and abolitionists like Matthias Baldwin have been defaced by protestors in blood-red paint.

These are not random acts of vandalism, but deliberate rituals. Acts of dismantling the West’s symbolic order piece by piece. Committed often by those who have inherited its greatest liberties. The destruction is justified in moral terms, but the targets (Churchill, Lincoln, Grant) betray a deeper animus: not of injustice, but of Western inheritance itself. In this fever to cleanse history, statues are being toppled not because they have been forgotten, but because they could still mean a lot. Because they might remind the West of its power. Of its duty and of its Greatness.

In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele has waged a war on symbols too. He had gang graffiti bulldozed from buildings. Murals glorifying murderers were blacked out overnight. Cartel-built cemeteries were razed. Tattoo iconography outlawed. Entire neighborhoods once ruled by MS-13 gangs were renamed, repaved, and reclaimed. This was combined with states of emergency, mass arrests, and fortress-like prisons. Bukele’s rule, both cosmetic and coercive, worked. He understands something vital: symbols are more than decoration. If you want to change the soul of a people, you start with what they see, what they salute, what they signal. El Salvador, once called the “murder capital of the world,” now has the lowest homicide rate in Latin America, a 98% drop in less than a decade.

The West, in contrast, is letting its civilizational symbols burn. Its heroes are being torn down not entirely by foreign invaders, but by its own children.

"Everything great we have today was once a dream. If we don’t dream today, we will have nothing to give to the future. It is a treason to time itself.”

In 2020, Missor started the foundry for his Atelier in Nice, France, with his own savings. He gathered a group of like minded people — disillusioned with modernity and hungry for meaning — and they all set out to do something none of them had any experience in. His brother Massoud, a computer scientist, was also roped in. They started off with making busts of Nietzsche for their friends. The market responded positively and their work was found to be in high demand. The team then expanded its offerings to making busts of other Western heroes; Dostoevsky, Marcus Aurelius, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Joan of Arc. Up to five thousand busts have been made and sold commercially. Students nearby started saving months of salary to be able to afford memorabilia of people they never thought worth remembering.

Making no effort to blend in with the casual look, the tech wearables and jeans of the modern world, the team looks as if leapt out of a storybook. According to Missor, they all wear the “uniform a sculptor should wear”. Inspired by the Compagnons du Devoir, the medieval French guild of master artisans, the Atelier crew dresses in matching white button-down shirts, pleated trousers, dark socks, suspenders, and worn brown leather shoes. They are rugged, tattooed, and unapologetically out of step with the fashions around them. The effect is deliberately theatrical. Their clothing, like their craft, is a statement: this is not just a job, this is a calling, a way of life.

There are no machines in their foundry. Missor first crafts the mold in clay, the rest of the team — a total of ten, including the brothers — make the statues in bronze. “It’s the same technique since antiquity."

The Atelier’s first big call to action came when they decided to gift a 3 meter bronze statue of Napoleon Bonaparte to the city of Nice. “We made it in terrible circumstances. We had nothing, nobody. We went to the junkyard to find metals and other objects. We made our own industrial oven to melt the bronze. We built an entire foundry out of nothing. We just had this dream of honoring Napoleon”.

The city loved it. The Atelier was then asked to make a statue of Joan of Arc. Then came the pushback. A far left politician took it upon himself to keep the statue from being installed. He attacked it verbally, then bureaucratically but was unable to harm it physically. The people of the city of Nice turned out in protest against judge orders brought about through the handiwork of the politician to take the statue down. The statue stood tall towards the end of 2024. It is still standing. Napoleon, on the other hand, remains in exile, his statue awaiting a permanent home, three years on.

Fourteen years, from the ages of seventeen to twenty-eight, Missor spent drifting. A long, drawn out crisis of meaning. “They don't teach us to create flying planes, they want us to remember historical dates”. He was angry, unimpressed, and convinced that the world had failed. He told himself he could have made a better one; finer, friendlier, more just.

Until a fateful visit to Paris, a city he had long dismissed.

One day, walking through the Louvre, the weight of the past fell upon him. “For the first time, I was crushed by doubt. I was ashamed of my arrogance… All those majestic buildings... I felt crushed by them.” He wandered into Place Vendôme. And there stood Napoleon in a great bronze column risen in his honor. Missor froze. The city with its stones, sculptures, and memory wasn’t asking for his approval, he realized. The city was judging him.

“Napoleon, the one who had built this city, the one who had set Europe on fire and in blood, was judging me. He seemed to say to me: ‘Who are you to have questioned thousands of years? Who are you to have questioned civilization?’

I stood before him — before ten thousand years of war. And I felt minuscule.”

That moment marked the end of the cynicism. Shortly after, he left for Nice. “It was not a cool experience, it was a terrifying experience. I felt a duty and burden to honor the past.” There, he resolved to begin his life anew, in humbleness, without theories and judgment. “With the simple purpose of being useful to society.”

It was not philosophy or ideology that changed him. It was beauty. Order. Form. The sculptures and architecture of Paris brought him to his knees and gave him the one thing the modern world had so far failed to provide: a reason to care.

When I press on about what was the defining turn that did it for him, he concludes that the experience forced him to accept the existence of Good and of Evil. From that moment on, he began to view the world differently. Every experience, every artifact, every person, he would ask: Is this good or evil?

Good, for him, became synonymous with construction, with trust, with discipline, with thinking for those who come after. “The next step,” he said, “was to start respecting society and civilization.” He began to dress better. He made himself more pleasant to be around. He worked on his vocabulary. “Language,” he says, “is a sculpture made by thousands of people across millennia.”

The artist who once scoffed at the world now saw it for what it was: a work in progress passed from hand to hand, generation to generation. And saw that it was now his turn to shape it. “The higher mission right now with art is to insult the West.” By making ugly and controversial art, he believes, the objective is to demoralize society.

Missor believes it is no accident that the West, and not other civilizations, finds itself under siege. Because the West did something rare: it made truth sacred.

“The West was objectively on the right track,” he says. “Since the Greeks — since the pursuit of Truth. That’s not something that exists everywhere. We take it for granted, the idea that everyone values truth. But only the West made it sacred.”

It was this pursuit of truth, he argues, that allowed the West to free itself from the chaos of nature. Through science, it learned to make predictions. Through language and philosophy, it built trust. That’s why the majority of the world’s great inventions came from the West — not because of geography, but because of principle.

For Missor, building statues is about continuity and remembrance. Statues honor the civilizational project that made us, and remind us that is not yet over, that now we are responsible for what comes next.

Now Atelier Missor has set its sights on America. “If you want to do anything great, there is only one place left.” They want to open a foundry here, build thousands of statues honoring Western tradition, with their first act of devotion being a 30 meter statue of the Greek Titan Prometheus for Starbase, Texas made entirely of titanium. Few materials could better evoke the spirit of spacefaring ambition, prized for its strength-to-weight ratio and resistance to corrosion, Titanium is rarely used for monumental art. Most statues are made of bronze or stone, materials of the past. Titanium, by contrast, is a metal of the jet age, of spacecraft and surgical implants.

The Soviet Union experimented with titanium in Cold War-era monuments. Among the rare surviving examples is the 200 feet tall "Mother Ukraine" statue in Kyiv, completed in 1981. In recent years, the statue has had Soviet emblems removed, trident of Ukraine added.

Prometheus, the team believes, is the perfect figure to cast in such metal. “He gave us everything, and he was punished for it.” In myth, he stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind; an act of rebellion, of technological transmission, of civilizational birth. For this, he was bound and punished, his liver perpetually devoured. But America, too, was forged by such fire: revolting against kings, taming nature, pushing boundaries. Nowhere is that spirit more alive than at Starbase, a launch site built on the edge of the continent, aimed at the stars. Prometheus belongs there, his fire upgraded to rocket fuel, his punishment repurposed as resolve.

“We broke a long chain of transmission. We created a void in civilization. The Greeks and the Romans gave us statues, so we remember them. And we are giving nothing to the future of our civilization.

Why titanium? It is difficult to destroy.