In the quiet, wind-swept landscapes of the former Yugoslavia, concrete structures rise from the earth like otherworldly monuments from another time, shaped by the dreams of a country that no longer exists.

Once symbolic monuments of collective unity, resistance and a utopian vision, are scattered all over the many countries in the Balkans. These are world war 2 anti-fascist memorials, built between 1966-1990, standing in varied states of decay, but still radiating a solemn power and reminder.

All my work throughout 25 years as an artist has revolved around exploring the tension between nature and culture, destruction and beauty and Humanity`s place inside a bigger picture.

Echoes of Utopia explores these many hundred monuments throughout the entire Balkans, from an entirely new perspective of both art and documentary through the eyes of the almost forgotten method of large format collodion wet-plate photography from the 1850`s, representing the birth of the photographic image.

These fine art photographs are analogically made on metal plates in 13×18 cm., coated with collodion and silver nitrate, exposed in large-format cameras, and developed on site in a makeshift darkroom. The results of this process are imperfect chemical processes unveiling ghostly organic anomalies that are not corrected but embraced, echoing the expressionistic nature of exposing human fragility to concrete brutality. The juxtapose to this organic technique is an unmatched quality and sharpness as the liquid collodion film is at ISO 1 without filmgrain.

Its unique quality and inherent unpredictability, stands in stark contrast to the uncompromising solidity of the Brutalist monuments. Where concrete imposes, collodion flows. Where Brutalism is monumental, wet plates are intimate, ephemeral. The result is a haunting visual dialectic, inviting conversation between permanence and fragility, ideology, memory and myth. This body of work does not seek to document or archive, but rather to transform them into visual elegies.

Adding the human aspect of the last remaining partisans with close collodion portraits (including their personal stories through filmed interviews) will make this series complete. In this pairing, the past becomes personal, memory becomes visible, and the viewer is invited to reflect on what we choose to remember, and what we allow to fade.

This humanistic approach gives both perspective and narrative about dignity, trauma, reconciliation, and possibly healing a part of history without rewriting it. The portraits and Spomeniks will be exhibited together as each is incomplete without the other. Together they form a dialogue between utopian ideals and lived experience, between the abstraction of architecture and the fragility of human life.

Where architecture are intellectual, the portraits are personal, invoking empathy and even more resonance. As the organic soft human, history and truth connects to these concrete brutalist monuments, the series invites a to undeertsand an strong connection of hope, loss and history.

In contrast to our current age of technology, the alchemical process of collodion recontextualizes these monuments, not as relics of propaganda, nor as obsolete war memorials, but as poetic thresholds between past and present, utopia and aftermath. They become luminous apparitions, suspended in time, reflecting both the grandeur of their original intent and the melancholy of their abandonment.

Throughout this unique series is a reminder og nature vs. culture, and how we, in the present, mark collective memory of crucial events in architecture. My intention is to invite conversation exploring memory, architecture, ideology and history. Included in this also lies the concept of unity, freedom, and sacrifice against the face of oppression, and if ideals of unity can survive a political collapse.