The Soviet concept of the dormitory suburb was a progressive and future-oriented ideal. Those idealistic images seem to endure in the mind even though they’re wholly divorced from reality nowadays. We live among the ruins of a vast empire. Utopia has proved itself a dystopia several times and to some extent we’re all traumatised by the disappearance of the future-oriented idea of socialist progress, even those who never wanted anything to do with it. It’s why our native land is the way it is today. [...]
My new project dedicated to the idea of socialist suburban housing consists of photos taken in Russia, Belarus, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and other eastern European and ex-communist bloc countries. Each country has its own quirks determined by the quality of its architectural projects, the types of construction materials used, and the current condition of the buildings. In Tito-era Yugoslavia, for example, architects enjoyed considerably more freedom than their counterparts in the USSR and many other socialist countries, which gave them the opportunity to carry out projects that were daring and progressive by the standards of the time. But the principles of spatial organisation were universal, so it’s often difficult to tell at first glance where a particular photo was taken. [...]
Architecture interests me as an integral part of the lived processes of human endeavour, as a discipline with complex links to the spheres of civic life, politics, economics and culture. It’s always sensitive to ongoing social processes, to embodying and documenting society’s hopes — and the defeat of said hopes. The subject matter I work with does, of course, call for an understanding of these processes, but I’m not sure whether Soviet literature on architectural history and theory, highly ideological as it is, is of any real help in this regard. Having said that, I do have a copy of the chunky History of Soviet Architecture, which I spent ages tracking down and which now serves me well, if only as a source of creative inspiration. I’m influenced by old Soviet architectural photography (which explains, in large part, my decision to combine colour photographs with black-and-white ones) and also by Soviet realist painting, which was always more representative of hopes and dreams than of reality, embedding as it did workaday situations into idealised scenarios.
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