Balconies: Why Do We Have Them Like This?

The idea of the book started with the question: why do we have such balconies? In post-Soviet cities, they often do not look "balcony-like": some are rebuilt, some are used as living spaces, and some are cluttered.

Before you is a literary text, its heroine is a researcher. She observes balconies, listens to people's stories, makes excerpts from books and old newspapers, analyzes films and performances, highlighting scenes on balconies. She combines notes and conversation records with images and photographs, includes short stories in the text, sometimes resembling fairy tales or dreams. This is an exhibition-book, which can be started from any place.

In the first part, readers can observe the course of the research; in the second, its result and methodology are shown. The heroine describes the metaphorical properties of the balcony-as-an-object and creates a concept of six balconies (six balcony functions) on this basis.

"The logic of the connection between these fragments, visual and textual, is nonlinear, it is affective and intuitive. Relying precisely on this logic, we decide whether to throw away a jar of zucchini caviar, keep a broken hair dryer, and our school notebooks. In the same way, our balconies become overgrown with things, accumulate additional structures, and live their balcony life together with us. Similarly, the spaces of the cities we live in are arranged."

Oksana Vasyakina
Literary editor of the book