Tower And Boxes

Sometimes they are desolate ruins, sometimes they are just old buildings, but they fulfil the Bauhaus dream of ideal housing for an ideal society. Today, most of Latvia's population lives in Soviet-built apartment blocks. The walls of reality, which have retained echoes of the dreams of the social utopians.

The utopia did not come true, the modernist project of a beautiful future did not materialise, but we — deprived of any images of the future — keep coming back to this dream. We are interested in what used to cause boredom and even disgust — life inside and behind the walls of panelled and silicate boxes and towers, what power structures were imprinted in these architectural structures, what the people who invented this architecture and embodied it in new urban landscapes dreamed of and achieved.

This is what the authors, exhibition curator, DJ and discussion participants are interested in. For four evenings we met in a closed bar on the outskirts of the city to chat online, listen to music and look at photographs.