With Echoes of Utopia, Norwegian photographer Christian Houge turns his attention to the Spomeniks, the modernist monuments erected across the former Yugoslavia after World War II. Photographed using the historic wet collodion process, these concrete structures appear in an unexpected light: at once monumental and fragile, historical yet almost timeless. Through this technical choice, Houge offers a singular perspective on these vestiges of a 20th-century political utopia.
Hundreds of Spomeniks were built across the landscapes of the former Yugoslavia between the 1960s and 1980s. Often monumental in scale and typically made of concrete, these memorials adopted a modernist vocabulary close to Brutalism and abstract sculpture. They mark the sites of battles or massacres linked to World War II and commemorate the antifascist resistance. More broadly, they were intended to embody a political project: inscribing in the landscape the memory of a shared struggle and the vision of a unified Yugoslav society. Today, many of them remain in remote locations, visible traces of a historical project that has since disappeared.
Over the past fifteen years, these striking forms have attracted the attention of several contemporary photographers. Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers, in his book Spomenik (2010), presented them as abstract sculptures emerging from empty landscapes, while French photographer Jonk Jimenez approached them as abandoned relics of modernist architecture.
The Echoes of Utopia series enters this context while adopting a very different perspective. Rather than documenting the monuments or emphasizing their architectural presence, Christian Houge photographs them using the wet collodion process, a technique developed in the mid-19th century. The images are produced on metal plates coated with silver nitrate, exposed in large-format cameras, and developed on site in a makeshift darkroom.
For Houge, this technique is more than an aesthetic choice. “With wet collodion photography, it is not the moment that is captured, but a more soulful existence that emerges” the artist explains. The process is complex, unstable, and unpredictable. “Each flaw has deepened my understanding of this intricate, alchemical process. Collodion is not just technique: it’s about embracing imperfection and letting chance shape the image.”
This fragile materiality contrasts with the solidity of the Spomeniks. “Where concrete imposes, collodion flows. Where Brutalism is monumental, wet plates are intimate and ephemeral” Houge notes. The artist does not aim to produce a documentary archive. “This body of work is conceived as a visual elegy, exploring themes of memory and impermanence.”
In the photograph Tjentište, for example, the monument created in 1971 by sculptor Miodrag Živković appears within an almost timeless atmosphere. Chemical veils, cracks, and traces left by the photographic process—deliberately preserved—echo the erosion visible on the concrete structures themselves. The monuments seem to transform into almost spectral presences.
Through this process, the Spomeniks are no longer seen merely as relics of propaganda or obsolete war memorials. Collodion recontextualizes them as thresholds between past and present, between political utopia and uncertain memory. Suspended in an indeterminate temporality, the images of Echoes of Utopia offer a new way of looking at these structures: not only as historical objects, but as forms open to renewed emotional and visual interpretation.
