After living a better life abroad for years, he returned to Latvia in the 1990s and was able to reclaim his grandfather’s building, in which he himself had lived until he was four. The building was in dire condition. He evicted the tenants who had grown to call these apartments home, living in communal apartments with a rent equivalent to 15 euro a month and rarely paying even that. The joke was that to replace a stolen mailbox three months rent needed to be collected. The building is now fully renovated and is rented to embassy workers and foreign corporation representatives for 700 to 900 euro a month. In the time between the evacuation and the renovations, I went into the apartments and photographed what was left behind. No doubt the unwillingness to leave played a part in the traces left.
Having little esteem for their landlords, the expelled tenants didn’t worry about cleaning up. The spaces still felt ‘warm’ and I didn’t feel fully comfortable in them. Other than some rusty appliances and old magazines, everything had been taken, but you can’t take the walls, and these yielded much information. They echoed a hundred years of history and cultural influence, from art nouveau stencils and layers of wallpa- pered newspaper in different scripts, to cutouts of Eminem and the Backstreet Boys.
The graffiti on the wall in the stairwell said – “The people that will live here will die. But we will still come here to drink”. /
On Site review 24
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