In Arnau Rovira’s striking photographic series, the Spomeniks — Yugoslavia’s monumental concrete memorials — stand as silent sentinels of a bygone era. These colossal structures, commissioned under Tito to commemorate World War II battles and anti-fascist resistance, were once symbols of unity and socialist modernism. Now, Rovira’s lens captures their eerie afterlife: cracked facades silhouetted against moody skies, geometric forms swallowed by encroaching forests, and sweeping curves that still whisper of cosmic ambition. His images transform these neglected monuments into meditations on time, ideology, and architecture’s stubborn persistence against political erasure.
Rovira’s compositions emphasize the Spomeniks’ surreal duality — both futuristic and archaic, heroic and melancholy. He frames their brutalist angles against organic landscapes, highlighting the tension between human aspiration and nature’s reclamation. Some appear like abandoned spacecraft; others resemble petrified explosions frozen mid-blast. The photographer’s restrained color palette — chilly blues, concrete grays, and the occasional rust stain — accentuates their solemn grandeur. Through careful attention to light and perspective, Rovira reveals how these structures oscillate between sculpture and architecture, their abstract forms originally intended to convey universal themes of struggle and liberation beyond literal representation.
Beyond documenting architectural oddities, Rovira’s work resurrects the Spomeniks’ buried narratives. Once sites of pilgrimage, many now languish in obscurity, their meanings fragmented by Yugoslavia’s dissolution. His photographs become visual archives, preserving their radical aesthetics while acknowledging their complicated legacy. The series invites viewers to ponder how societies memorialize collective memory — and what happens when the ideologies behind monuments crumble. In an age of historical revisionism, Rovira’s images offer no easy answers, only the quiet power of these concrete ghosts, still standing as testaments to a future that never arrived.
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in Bahia. 