More than two million Slovaks - over a third of the population - live in large, blocky apartment complexes. In the 1970s about 97% of the new construction in Slovakia was comprised of such residential blocks. (In comparison: in what is now the Czech Republic that figure was 70%, and in Poland 50%.) Andrej Balco photographed daily life in these Slovakian flats. This led to the question of whether the lives of the residents were as uniform as the buildings were. In the midst of the broken mailboxes and the endless concrete he found surprisingly varied and lively scenes. In the grey, prefabricated world everyone tries to get a little color in his or her life, a process in which tradition and contemporary consumerism join hands.

Andrej Balco (b. Czechoslovakia, 1973) was trained at the university in Silesia and works as a freelance photographer for a number of Slovakian journals. He has won various prizes and is a member of the photography collectives Sputnik Photos and Choice Images.