Across the former Yugoslavia, bold abstract monuments rise from forests, hillsides, and open fields. Built to commemorate the suffering and resistance of the Second World War, they also expressed the idea of a shared future. Their forms gave collective memory a lasting presence in the landscape.
With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the country around these monuments changed, and so did their meanings. Some remain places of remembrance; others have been neglected, damaged, or left to the slow work of weather and vegetation. Efforts to preserve them exist alongside disputes over the past they represent.
MONUMENTAL explores the relationship between these structures and the landscapes they inhabit. Through weathered surfaces, monumental scale, and quiet traces of abandonment, Dejan Petrović considers what survives when a shared political world disappears. The photographs ask how we remember, what we choose to preserve, and what we allow to fade.
15 photographs