My Socialist Home

Session Submission Type: Film

Brief Description

My Socialist Home captures the lived experiences of six characters whose lives have seen both the communist period and its aftermath in one of the housing blocks built in Bucharest during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965-1989). Although situated in a postsocialist condition, the film references this earlier historical context, foregrounding through intimate narratives the effects of the two major reforms that were initiated under Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania: one aimed at demographic growth through extreme practices to control reproduction, such as criminalising abortion, and as a consequence of this, the other focused on unprecedented mass housing construction, involving extensive demolitions. Despite the oppressive character of that time, the film reveals nuanced domestic spaces that had the ability to shape gendered social and spatial conditions, experiences of labour and generational relations, as well as the material affectivity of the home and its relationship to women’s bodies. My Socialist Home proposes an architecturally focused ethnography as a new methodology to address the relationship between gender, domestic space and the state, and to inquire into the ways in which this relationship has been transformed in the transition to a capitalist, Western-oriented structure of the everyday.

Sub Unit

• Film Series

Introduced by

• Ketevan Gurchiani, Ilia State U (Georgia)

Questions and Answers Moderated by

• Ecem Saricayir, University of California, Santa Cruz