Monumentality is synonymous with grandiosity, and fame, and oftentimes the grandiosity and fame of particular individuals. But monuments can be other things too. In this library, The After Monument, there are a wide variety of examples that go into fantastic detail on the background, history, intentionality, and various past and present realities of monuments from all around the world.

This particular case study is an at-times naive, wholly fascinated, and hopefully widely researched account of one individual’s fascination (mine) with the abstract concrete otherworldly figures scattered around the Balkan region --
the former Yugoslavia -- known as the Spomeniks.

After the death of Josip Boroz Titio, in 1980, the country dissolved and the region broke out into a brutal civil war in the early 1990s'. Many people throughout the region turned their frustrations on the monuments, as they represented an ideology, a dream, that was forced upon them. It needed to fall. However, due to their massive stature, it was more costly to destroy them than to leave them alone. And so, a vast majority of them were simply abandoned, and fell into disarray.

More than 1000 'spomenik' were built during the 1950-1980s, and today a few hundred of them still exist, scattered throughtout the seven Balkan countries. Once images of them started appearing on the internet, people from around the world became fascinated with their alienesque shapes and ambiguous symbolism. While largely forgotten or ignored in the Balkans, due to their complicated history, the rest of the world embraced them...

In 2010, on the newly launched image-sharing platform, Instagram, a series of images taken by Belgian photographer Jan Kampenaers went viral. It was early days, there were no hashtags back then, but eventually the images became a huge part of a movement of appreciation around old soviet-style architecture, concrete-poured megaliths, and other such otherworldly (to Western eyes) forms. The style is known as Brutalism - from the French, 'beton brut' meaning poured concrete. Many of the spomeniks were built in pure concrete with rebar and steel skeletons. They became almost the mascots of the movement.

But of course, with the proliferation of their photographs, their essence, history, the complex world from which they really came (not outer space) was conveniently left behind.


"The Spomeniks were places of forgetting, while they should have been places of remembering. The fury unleashed upon the Spomeniks after 1992 was not merely settling the score with the old socialist system, but was also exposing that hidden history that had led to the reopening of Pandora’s box in the first place. We see the powerful beauty of the monumental sculptures and we catch ourselves forgetting the victims in whose name they were built.

The photographs raise the question of whether a former monument can ever function as a pure sculpture, an autonomous work of art, detached from its original meaning. In their dilapidated condition, they are no longer symbols of victory, but for the first time, true symbols of a newfound mourning.”

-- Willem Jan Neutelings, Spomenik, The Monuments of Former Yugoslavia

After closely researching these monuments, I couldn't help but feel confused. They are beautiful but complicated. The symbolism and intention that is built into them by brilliant and forward-thinking architects like Bogdan Bogdanovic is lost in a mess of history. The dreams of the dictator, Tito, of a united Yugoslavia - dreams that are still dreamed of by many individuals to this day, were too hard. Hard on the people and hard to manifest. But they were built first and foremost to inspire people to accept the difficulty of the past, and to look to the future with hope and determination. This was the concrete dream - forward together.

Today, the internet has made them into anyone's guess, anyone's interpretation. The shapes still inspire, but what they inspire is no longer up to any one individual. Curious about by the very rich and active community that the Spomenik have on Instagram, in particular through the use of hashtags (#antifascistmemorial, #spimenik, #brutalism), I reached out to a number of people that have posted popular images inspired by the monuments to comment on the possibility of re-invention.

The answers are anonymous and not connected to the images shown.