“Eternal monuments in the dark”: the brutalist beauty of fragments of a bygone era (46 photos)

Xiao Yan is a photographer and designer from Beijing who has been living in Spain for the past three years. Xiao enjoys exploring cities, abandoned places, traveling and photography. She says she is fascinated by brutalist architecture, massive concrete monuments, towers, bunkers, underground tunnels, etc. At night, such places become scary. But there is a story behind them and they still “shine in the dark.”

“For the last 9 years, since 2012, I have been traveling around Europe, photographing monuments at night,” says the photographer. “Monuments carry people’s memories, they “record” changes in history and culture, and become a symbol of memory of those who died in the past...”

"However, some monuments inevitably faded over time, were abandoned or even destroyed. They look so glorious and so lonely, not to mention their aesthetic value. The bold and avant-garde monuments of the past were filled with utopian and futuristic fantasies, this beauty is dazzling and timeless."

"I come to them in the dark and paint them with light. I want to show their beauty through a new approach. Using light photography, I try to create a door: a door that connects the past and the future, prosperity and decline, glory and pain, me and what stands before my eyes. Creating surrealism in reality is a fascinating process."

“I want to dedicate this series of photographs to those who designed the monuments and to those who were once remembered by these monuments.”

Countries in which the pictures were taken: Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania, Armenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Albania, Ukraine, Germany, Denmark, Spain.