Living Units /Unitati de locuit
series of photographs, Dunajvaros, Budapest, 2003

installation, Project Room, Ludwig Museum for Contemporary Art Budapest, 2003

Living units is the result of our research on serial architecture and its implications in several locations through Budapest, Bucharest and Dunajvaros. The project refers to post-socialist living in these cities where people had to adapt to the post-traumatic situation. Blocks of flats have lost the ideology that created them. The trip to Dunajvaros was very important in our research because the city was constructed from nothing, a pure utopian socialist city raised at a cross roads from Stalin's order. Dunajvaros was at first named Stalin's city. Many houses in the romanian cities were destroyed by the urban planning of the communist regime to make room for the new socialist blocks of flats. We wanted to reverse the real situation in our installation. We projected two films with serial socialist architecture filmed through the streets of these cities as pattern on the surface of two simple shaped houses. In Budapest we made a series of photographs with our flat furniture designed in the style of the 70 - 80s, now old and damaged. What fascinated us was the fact that this kind of interior could be anywhere in the former socialist territories. This flat particularly reminded us about a flat in Ploiesti 1980... It was like revisiting Utopia after 20 years - we felt a little bit like working in an archaeological research. index