Concrete and Unclear

fantastic little splash, a collective of investigative artists from Ukraine continues to trace the connection between the past and the present as seen through the architectural structures erected in the Soviet times. Concrete and Unclear (2018) is a documentary short film devoted to the Hotel “Parus” in Dnipro, Ukraine. Hotel “Parus”, which was meant to be a grand symbol of Dnipropetrovsk,the homeland of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, never opened— its construction was halted on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This unfinished building became one of the symbols of the city and started to function as a matrix for a spectrum of the present concerns. The hotel symbolizes the impossibility of Soviet claims, the domination of private capital, and the pro-Ukrainian mood of the inhabitants of the eastern city. Hotel “Parus” has become a space of imagination that opposes reality and at the same time reproduces it.