‘PANELKA’ is a Russian colloquial term for an apartment building constructed of pre-fabricated concrete panels, built throughout the Soviet period. These buildings were a cheap, efficient solution to the Soviet Union’s overpopulation issue as their longitudinal space allowed for a plethora of homes on a small area of land. However, after the collapse of the Union and exponentially since then, many of these buildings have been left without any upkeep, which has turned many neighbourhoods into grey, lifeless collections of concrete blocks that serve no aesthetic purpose to their surrounding areas.
The project intends to observe the way that human beings are able to transform a seemingly uncharacteristic, bland space into a beautifully nostalgic and exciting place, therefore addressing people who are in a similar position as myself or are familiar with ‘homesickness’ in general. By retelling an intimate and personal experience in an apartment buildingin Riga, I utilise explorative moving image to express how my impression of the same space has altered after I have moved outside of Latvia. Through the implementation of motion graphics, the specific narrative guides the audience through the project housing and into the personal home both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. This encapsulates a more intimate connection to what it is that these buildings represent.
The black and white tones within the picture represent two contrasting themes – the white tones celebrate the emotional, intimate experience inside my family’s apartment, whilst the black tones showcase the practical and function based design of the blocks and their emergence during Soviet times within the Eastern Bloc. The streets that can be seen on the map of Riga that guide through my neighbourhood work as visual elements that create consistency throughout the film.
Le Murmure is one of the two dominant typefaces utilised to enhance the typographic visual language of the project. It is predominantly used to beautifully capture the powerful nature of Cyrillic text, also representing the oxymoronic charm of Brutalism. The latter typeface used is Akzidenz-Grotesk, a grotesque sans-serif that characterises the simplicity and efficiency of the brutalist nature present within these concrete blocks. The typeface’s diverse type family allows for extensive experimentation when displaying information without a contrasting visual aesthetic.
