HELGA 2
Recycling the Soviet Era
During Soviet times there was no individualism. Everyone wore the same clothes, drove the same car, owned the same kitchen utensils and lived in apartments with the same layout. Why? To ensure people’s loyalty to the government. Every week and every life was identical – a united country of comradeship.
20 years after the collapse of the USSR, now independent post-soviet states are once again facing the fear of falling back to the Russian dictatorship. Free democratic countries are threatened by the loss of their country’s culture and individualism.
How to preserve nation, culture and individualism if history should repeat itself? This is a speculative redesign of one of the most important status symbol of the Soviet era, the furniture wall (Stenka in Russian). The possibility to easily reshape the wall unit, the form spread out in the room, and the individual mirror pieces on the cabinet create an interaction between the person and the object. All to remind the user of their roots and themselves as individuals rather than comrades.
The recyclable production and materials ensures a new life for the product, even if the dictatorship were to fall once more and people would want to get rid of the Soviet status symbols.
