“Space shapes a person; constraints free the soul”: Watercolour sketches of Moscow panel-block apartments on the eve of demolition.

Abstract

This visual anthropology project was informed by a series of plein-air water-color sketches of panel-block apartment buildings, painted in conversation with ethnographic research participants in Moscow in 2021. Such housing, built on an industrial scale during Nikita Khrushchev’s mass-housing campaign between 1955 and 1964, and which came to be nicknamed khrushchevkas, became ubiquitous across the Soviet Union. In 2017, in Moscow, Russia, panel-block apartments were threatened by the renovatsiya campaign, which asked residents to vote to demolish their own homes, now declared dilapidated housing. The author painted a number of these apartment buildings slated for demolition, recording details in the construction, ornamentation, and topography of each apartment block. The author also gathered testimonies of artists who live in-, and whose artistic practice revolves around such housing, asking participants to share their artistic process, memories of growing up and living in such housing, and feelings about the prospect of losing their home. While supported by the majority of the population, the renovatsiya campaign would erase local histories, revealing the state’s authoritarian attitude towards its own citizenry, but much worse, it served as premonition for Russia’s renewed aggression in Ukraine, which, less than a year later, caused a widespread political and humanitarian disaster, closing all possibility for further research.&nbsp