This is the entry hall to the large scale estate my parents live in. The building is 5 entrances long and 12 stories high. Each entrance gives access to 3 flats per floor, so in total it’s 180 flats in one building. Something a bit like this. It’s difficult to talk class in Poland (almost 50 years of the grand communist experiment made the western European categories of class pretty useless in relation to the Polish society), it’s equally difficult to fully say who lives in this sort of buildings. After the World War II over 85% of Warsaw was demolished flat, so the post-war buildings were mainly supposed to house many people and quickly. Not much concern with the aesthetics or functionality. Unfortunately post-war in this instance lasted till early 1990s.

Please click to view large.

I chose to photograph the hall way, because there have been millions upon million pictures of the outside of these buildings taken. And i think this shows pretty well what uncontrolled habitation can cause in terms of quality of living space. This has been at the moment when post boxes were taken off to be replaced with new ones chosen along the rules of the European  Union.

There are several layers of paint (this yellow-y paint – color and gloss – is default in all of these buildings, everywhere) on every wall because people ‘draw’ on them no end. Draw, interestingly enough mainly penises and dubious quality tags. All of this gets periodically painted over with a paint which rarely matches the color of the previous one.

There’s definitely something different about estates in Poland in comparison to England. But I can’t quite put my finger to it. It’s part of this cultural awerness one just has when they were brought up somewhere, cultural capital if you like. Being the hibryd that I am, living in two places, I’m always interested in this type of knowledge and how difficult it is to translate both ligustically and when it comes to merits.

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