Intimate nostalgia: what the walls of abandoned Soviet apartments can tell you about

The interiors of our apartments often keep traces of the life of previous owners for a long time. We can talk about old door handles, baseboards painted by children, or even about the mezzanine that has not been disassembled to the end since the move. But especially a lot of such inherited trifles are hidden behind wallpaper pasted on top of old newspapers. 

Photographers Elena Amabili and Alessandro Calvaresi traveled around the countries to find out what kind of stories lurk under the wallpaper and plaster of abandoned buildings. 

In contrast to the typical photographs of crumbling modernist architectural masterpieces or forgotten nuclear bases, the empty interiors of Soviet apartments, which have become the object of attention of the photo project "Soviet Privacy", look as if they are full of life.

The "wallpaper hunters", as Elena and Alessandro called themselves, were most attracted by the bright abstract patterns that seemed to have come to the surface from under the old layers of history. It seemed that they could tell about the people who once lived here.

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