WEEKEND 2126

2008

Digital pigment prints

Edition of 3+1

Today, less than half a century after their construction, socialist memorials around Bulgaria look like foreign bodies that came out of nowhere and were stuck in into the structure of a city or into the slope of a mountain. Most of these monuments' contemporaries have lost any respect to them, and the younger generation born after the 80's does not see any symbolics in them; for this generation the memorials serve rather as a playground - a free space for a short session of sex, smoking or a graffiti exercise. 

How would these places look in yet another 150-200 years after they'd lost their primary function? How would they be apprehended by the "future man" - the ideal human being in whose name they have been erected? 

These photographs offer a possible version of these memorials' existence a few generations later. They mix their original utopian pathetic with another mass utopia myth - that of the low-end sci-fi movies from the 60's and 70's. The abandoned monuments resemble half-rotten Aztec pyramids and have turned into a venue for a nice Sunday walk or for some obscure family rituals. Everything is nice and sunny, the past is happily gone into oblivion, it is the present day that counts.

The images are actually family portraits of close friends of ours - the Smolyanov's and the Valchev's family. Costumes and props have been designed by themselves.