In 2021, a dozen visual artists came together to create artworks based on our shared experience of growing up and living in Soviet-era panel-block apartments in Moscow and Berlin. The art project, which sought to develop a collective aesthetic of socialist housing, was initiated as part of postdoctoral research critically evaluating the demolition of socialist-era housing in Moscow. Painting became a method that allowed us to anchor our experiences and articulate memories of our former homes. A traveling exhibition was planned to foster transnational dialogue on the afterlives of postsocialist housing.In February 2022, Russia began a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. An early symbol of war became Soviet housing blocks devastated by bombing raids, standing with missing façades and exposed furniture. Recognizing it morally objectionable to lament Moscow’s socialist housing considering people’s lives and homes were being devastated in Ukraine, the ethnographer stopped the project. In its wake, he digitized original watercolour paintings, and assembled them into a feature-length animated film titled Empathy for Concrete Things (2024, 61 minutes), denouncing Russian aggression in Ukraine. The film combines ethnographic interviews confidentially gathered from participants following Russia’s invasion with research on the history of twentieth-century art and architecture. Empathy for Concrete Things thus considers the ways in which architecture can embody both utopian fantasy, and major calamities that shaped the history of the twentieth century; it explores notions of moral and political responsibility as evinced in physical space, and expresses its own rallying cry against destruction, all from the vantage point of concrete, panel-block apartments.The proposed multimodal installation will exhibit twelve original watercolour paintings that served as still-frames for the film, Empathy for Concrete Things, as well as the film itself. The paintings, ranging in size from 15x20 cm, to 56x76 cm, may be arranged in a rectangular pattern reminiscent of a room in a panel-block apartment, and either hung on the wall, or mounted using free-standing/hanging mounts. The film may be projected using a professional projector at the ethnographer’s disposal, or displayed on a flat-screen monitor mounted to the wall. The film will run on an hour-long loop, and may be connected to directional speakers, or to several headphone sets. The proposed multimodal installation will engage with the exhibition’s theme by drawing attention to anthropology’s competing attachments, bringing focus to-, and away from, research participants, the ethnographer, the viewing audience, visual framing devices, ethnographic narratives, and wider discourses of power. If paintings are textured, sensory objects, they invite a different type of engagement when animated and projected as stop-motion sequences onto a screen. A film on socialist panel-block housing exhibited in an ethnographic museum interrogates what we consider worthy of display as aesthetic-, political-, or social objects, beckoning the viewer to engage with competing visualities and materialities. Similarly, while the paintings are the ethnographer’s own creative effort, the film is part of creative commons, leaving it open to interpretation, modification, and remix

Gregory Gan is a trained visual anthropologist who researches post-socialist art and architecture. His training in visual anthropology resulted in acclaimed ethnographic films, several art exhibitions, and an interactive, multimodal installation. The film „Empathy for Concrete Things“ (2023) was completed as part of Gregory’s postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and hosted at the Collaborative Research Centre “Affective Societies” at Free University Berlin, during which he investigated the emotional afterlives of post-socialism.