SOVIET INNERNESS

A LOOK INTO THE SOVIET EVERYDAY THROUGH ABANDONED INNERNESS

Soviet Innerness is a collection of what is to be found on the interior walls of abandoned buildings left to rot and forgotten behind the former Iron Curtain. The idea of Soviet Innerness came to us in the summer of 2014 while taking photos inside a derelict Plattenbau in Irbene, a ghost town in Latvia. The settlement was once a closed city connected to a nearby secret radar centre, and was built to host Soviet military officers and their families.Who lived there? What were their jobs? How did their everyday life look like?

The project aims to show that behind the grey concrete outer panels there was life—coat upon coat of ageing paint bursting into three-dimensional shapes, surprising spectrums of colours, polka dot kitchen walls, teeth-brushing apes sketched above bathroom sinks, bright flowery 1970s wallpapers over layers of Pravda and other newspapers used as thickener in order to weatherproof the walls. Through Soviet Innerness, an ongoing and potentially endless project, we are essentially conducting a research and perseveration work concerning a world that no longer exists through a less considered perspective—the intimacy, the innerness.