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I am an anthropologist of architecture and of cities based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where I am Associate Professor in Critical Area Studies.
Still-socialist vs. recolonial
My work focuses on the complex social lives of monumental buildings and on the architecture and planning of state socialism. I am especially interested in the powerful––at once toxic and subversive––impacts that socialist-era built environments continue to exert on the neoliberal capitalist cities of the 21st century. I am not so much a scholar of "postsocialism", but of what I call "still-socialism".
Correspondingly, my work seeks to make sense of the intersecting, contradictory relationship between post-socialist, still-socialist and post-colonial (and decolonising) processes as they manifest in architecture. I am interested in the strange (and terrible) mix of material, aesthetic and ideological effects created by the coming together of "still-socialist" spectres, afterlives and remains with colonial and neo-imperial revenants. I am less interested in "postcolonial" or "decolonial" formations than in "recolonial" ones.
In short, my goal is to understand what happens when communist spectres (still-socialism or still-communism) intersect with colonial revenants (recolonialism) on the vast and diverse, but connected & contiguous territory formerly known as the postsocialist world; and which I call, together with my collaborators Tim Beasley-Murray and Wendy Bracewell, "the east of the west").
Resistance, occupation & reconstruction
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the russian federation, I have shifted my focus increasingly to the relationship between resistance, occupation and reconstruction. How do reconstruction processes contribute to Ukraine's resistance against russia and to the formation of a just and equitable (wartime and postwar) commons? How, conversely, does the russian federation deploy reconstruction as a tool for consolidating control over the territories of Ukraine it has temporarily occupied since its invasions of 2014 and 2022?
My bio
I received my PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University in February 2014. My dissertation was about the Palace of Culture and Science, a vast Stalin-era skyscraper "gifted" to Poland by the Soviet Union in 1955. My book on capitalist Warsaw's self-perceived 'obsession' with the Stalinist Palace, titled The Palace Complex, was published by Indiana University Press in March 2019. My Warsaw research has also resulted in several articles and book chapters, while my Polish-language book about the Palace was published by the Museum of Warsaw in July 2015. In 2024, I completed A Form of Friendship: The Museum on the Square, a book which critically interprets the spectacular new building of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, opened in November 2024 in the shadow of the Palace of Culture. The book is published simultaneously in Polish and in English.
I am in the process of completing work on a monograph, stemming from research conducted in russia in 2016-2019 (funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, held first at Queen Mary and subsequently at SSEES), on the relationship between architecture, politics, ecology and violence in contemporary russia.
The book resulting from my russia research, titled little empire: architecture, nature and violence in recolonial russia, is in production with MIT Press and scheduled for publication in 2027. Little Empire makes sense of the political aesthetics and political economy of russia's construction complex (stroikompleks); and sheds light on the materialities and modalities of violence and domination that coalesced in russia during the later decades of the USSR and during the post-Soviet period. This research has helped me to understand also how these structures of violence transport themselves to other territories in the course of russia's post-Soviet wars––including, but not limited to, Chechnya, Syria, and especially Ukraine.
In 2025, I am co-curator of Ukraine's national pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition––La Biennale Di Venezia. The exhibition, titled Дах (Dakh): Vernacular Hardcore, explores the relationship between domesticity, reconstruction and resistance in wartime Ukraine. I am editor of Mini––Atlas, the guide to Дах––available for download via the project website in exchange for a donation to the three grassroots charities featured in the exhibition: KHARPP, Livij Bereh and Klyn Drones.
Portrait by Olga Alexeyenko
