Zweiraumwohnung

We often participate passively in the life of the world community, and our participation has no geographical limitations, unlike us. It is precisely this dissonance that increasingly divides us into two separate spaces — the mind and the body. The photographs which formed the basis for every single story of the project were taken in either one or the other corner of my apartment, where I spend most of my daily life.

A Zweiraumwohnung is not just the most common type of city home; it also represents a coordinate system for a typical urbanite. I spent more than half my life in two-room apartments. The world is becoming more open for doing business, communicating, traveling, and establishing connections, and yet our life is becoming more and more secluded. It seems compressed to the size of a small apartment. The body’s range of movement is limited to one or two rooms and the path between them. Each day starts with a certain ritualized sequence of actions. The mind simultaneously solves global world political conflicts, participates in information and real wars, experiences economic crises, travels around the world, communicates with people from all over the world, and processes a ton of information about people and places we do not know. It goes around the world and communicates with others, regardless of physical distance. We often participate passively in the life of the world community, and our participation has no geographical limitations, unlike us. It is precisely this dissonance that increasingly divides us into two separate spaces — the mind and the body.

The photographs which formed the basis for every single story of the project were taken in either one or the other corner of my apartment, where I spend most of my daily life. In the video for the project, you can observe all the daily and inconspicuous activities of mine, which even I would say appear as if seen through the window of the house opposite. Listen to the latest news in the background after all the hustle and bustle, or a short five-minute meditation track! Like an astronaut on a spaceship, I wake up and start my daily routine: I work, get my chores done, look after my family, and then I am out on my spacewalk into orbit on the Internet, connecting to the rest of the world and able to calm down while absorbing information, watching the lives of the others, thinking about serious social issues. It is so trivial and so strange at the same time. Thirty years ago, the world was a completely different place. This period seems a turning point.