Kommunalka - the Soviet Utopia that Failed

Cracks instead of wrinkles. Instead of age spots on their bodies, these houses get mould on the walls and the wrinkled remains of wallpaper beneath crumbling stucco. Old houses are like old people, and sometimes their eyes – the windows – get weak with age or blind. But they absorb the stories of their inhabitants and repeat them for a long time. St. Petersburg’s public housing is full of the traces of eventful lives. That by itself would be only an approximate perspective, but these pictures tell the story in particular of the blurred edges of an often difficult neighbourhood. There is a basic common motif to the Kommunalka project, the story of a failed experiment that began with the dreams of the Bolsheviks in 1917, when the brand-new revolution not only wanted to create new housing for workers but new workers as well. Shared bathrooms, WCs and hallways were more than just a compromise necessitated by a lack of space. They were also intended to consign the territorial thinking of bourgeois ownership to the dustbin of the past. But the dream of social community was fragmented into neglected zones and myriad neighbourhood skirmishes. Thus the sad transparency of curtains and naked proximity, of surrealistic kitchen still lives with hand-saw and casserole: they tell the story of far more than the simply private spaces and lines of demarcation of emotional transit. They also lead the viewer along the intended point of fracture of political fiction. Text by Ingo Petz (http://www.ingopetz.com) -- 2007

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Keywords communal housing; housing problem; russia shared flats; st petersburg;