The installation was created and presented in the building of the Bread House in Tsaritsyno — a space that, during the Soviet period, was used as communal apartments. In this context, the term “compaction” is significant: in the 1920s it referred to the practice of forcibly adding new residents to already inhabited apartments without increasing the available living area. This system continued for several decades, shaping the everyday conditions of communal life, the density of neighbourly relations, and the ways people coexisted within limited domestic space.
The central element of the installation is a cabinet tightly filled with old suitcases. From inside the suitcases, quiet audio recordings can be heard — recollections of people who once lived in the communal apartments of the Bread House. To hear these voices, the viewer must come close and literally place an ear near the suitcase. This mode of listening creates an intimate, personal encounter with someone else’s memories and evokes the acoustic conditions of communal living, where the boundaries between private and shared space were blurred.
The second element of the installation is a suitcase suspended at a considerable height, out of physical reach. It also transmits one of the recorded memories. To hear it, the viewer must stand directly beneath the object and listen to the faint audio. This position introduces a different mode of perception: the suitcase functions as an image of a memory that remains inaccessible, “suspended” in space and time. It reflects an aspect of experience that is present yet cannot be fully retrieved or appropriated — a form of memory existing on the boundary between the personal and the collective.