Echoes of Utopia-Christian Houge

Monumental Yugoslav war memorials, once symbols of unity, now stand in decay. Using collodion wet plate, I explore memory, myth, and impermanence, where fragile surfaces meet brutalist forms, reflecting on how societies remember and forget.

Echoes of Utopia

Balkans 2025-ongoing April-May 2026

In the silent, wind-shaped landscapes of the former Yugoslavia, monumental concrete brutalist structures rise like remnants of a future that never fully arrived. Built between 1966 and 1990 to honor the anti-fascist resistance of the Second World War, these futuristic abstract memorials once embodied collective unity, truth utopian ideals. Today, scattered across the Balkans and marked by decay, they remain powerful yet ambiguous witnesses to history.
For over 25 years, my practice has explored the tension between nature and culture, destruction and beauty, and humanity’s place within a larger whole.

I photograph these monuments using the 19th-century collodion wet plate process. Each image is created on 13×18 cm. glass and metal plates, coated with collodion and silver nitrate, and developed on site in a mobile darkroom.

The slow, alchemical method, both fragile and exacting, embraces chemical imperfections while rendering remarkable sharpness and emotion from the monuments.
To me this craft is a homage to analog photography and an important contrast to todays technology and AI.
The fluid, unpredictable surface of collodion contrasts with the rigid permanence of brutalist concrete.
Where architecture asserts solidity, the photographic plate reveals vulnerability. The works function not as documentation, but as visual poetic reflections on ideology, memory, truth and myth.

I want the series to invite reflection on what societies choose to remember, what they allow to fade, and whether ideals of unity can endure beyond political collapse.