'I Grew Up In the Blockhouse' is an interactive archive that asks you to share your story or impression of life in Soviet blockhouses.

During Soviet times, the Latvian population grew quickly with incoming migrant workers from Russia. Nowadays, one-third of the inhabitants are native Russian speakers. However, there has been a social and political split between Latvian and Russian speakers for decades.It helps if there is a common ground between the conflicted groups. For example, two-thirds of Latvian inhabitants live in Soviet blockhouses, which appears to be the highest index of the population living in flats in Europe.

The houses themselves were positioned as a tool to cultivate communism according to Soviet ideology. From the 1950s until the 1980s, blockhouses were constructed following very similar architectural guidelines, which affected the flat plan, the shared space around the buildings, and the infrastructure. Therefore, people all around the Soviet Union, no matter their nationality or their location, were exposed to the same living experiences that remain nowadays as well. Almost everyone has lived there, both Latvian and Russian speakers. And even if it was a short-lived experience, people still tend to carry the shared memories of things that define those spaces: knowing your neighbor’s music taste, sensing a mixed smell of dinner and cologne in the stairway, and encountering potato sellers at the doors.

To this day, we are still capable of living cheek to cheek, but for some reason, we have forgotten these simple things that used to connect us. Therefore, this archive works as a tool to help enhance the communication model of different post-soviet social groups and build a better future together.

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