Ballad to the Balconies

project in collaboration with Małgorzata Trajkowska

2020

video, 7 ' 12 ''

The ballad for balconies is a love letter, a love song for architecture, for concrete, for the city, for „usable space - enabling better, visual contact with the environment,” crying for a substitute for the terrace.

This poetic visual poem was born from a longing for a place that we do not have - an architectural gap, the lack of a beloved balcony led us to reflect on housing, we are arranging a meeting between house and outdoors, house and field, house and home.

The found-footage materials in the video present the „ideal housing estate” in St. Louis built in accordance with the ideals of the CIAM International Congress of Modern Architecture, consisting of 33 11-story blocks from a large slab. They were demolished in 1972 in the United States as the planned improvement in the lives of residents turned out to be unrealistic utopia, and the estate itself began to produce crime and vandalism.

The ballad for balconies is our shy thought about the impact of the place where we live on our lives.