Memoria: Skopje (2021)
Is a photographic work about the layered urban identity of North Macedonia’s capital, a city continually reshaped by natural disaster, political shifts, and changing ideological agendas. In 1963, an earthquake devastated much of the city’s center, triggering an international reconstruction effort led by the United Nations and architects from across the world. Skopje was reimagined as a model of socialist modernization, where modernist and Brutalist structures rose beside surviving socialist era buildings, marking a period of ambitious architectural transformation. Over subsequent decades, evolving governmental priorities, new interventions, neglect, and the controversial Skopje 2014 project further altered the city’s appearance.
Today, Skopje stands as an urban palimpsest in which conflicting histories and aesthetics coexist in visible tension. I photographed some of the key structures suchas the Central Post Office, Goce Delčev Dormitory, Universal Hall, City Trade Center, Macedonian National Opera and Ballet, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, and the Academy of Sciences and Arts, observing their relationship to contemporary urban life. Working both inside and outside these buildings, the project approaches them not only as architectural artifacts but as active carriers of memory.
As someone born after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, I inevitably encounter “Yugonostalgia” as a complex and shifting form of inherited memory. The city’s architecture becomes a vessel through which these memories are negotiated. Physical locations, symbols,and structures anchor collective and personal histories, yet they are alsounstable and subject to erasure. This project documents Skopje asit exists now, caught between past and present, and asks what happens to memory when the places that hold it begin to disappear.
Today, Skopje stands as an urban palimpsest in which conflicting histories and aesthetics coexist in visible tension. I photographed some of the key structures suchas the Central Post Office, Goce Delčev Dormitory, Universal Hall, City Trade Center, Macedonian National Opera and Ballet, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, and the Academy of Sciences and Arts, observing their relationship to contemporary urban life. Working both inside and outside these buildings, the project approaches them not only as architectural artifacts but as active carriers of memory.
As someone born after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, I inevitably encounter “Yugonostalgia” as a complex and shifting form of inherited memory. The city’s architecture becomes a vessel through which these memories are negotiated. Physical locations, symbols,and structures anchor collective and personal histories, yet they are alsounstable and subject to erasure. This project documents Skopje asit exists now, caught between past and present, and asks what happens to memory when the places that hold it begin to disappear.