How to miss a civilisation

Resist erasure. Capture the legacy of a vanished era. This briefing series tells the story behind Concrete Wastelands: where it came from, what it's trying to do, and who else is fighting to preserve what's left.

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For nearly two years, I lived in one of the world's greatest concentrations of socialist monumental art and saw none of it.

Not one mosaic. Not one piece of sgraffito. Originally from Belgium, I came to St. Peterburg to continue my master’s degree in business and finance. There, I regularly passed through Mayakovskaya metro, a station whose entire vault is covered in a large smalt mosaic of Vladimir Mayakovsky. He was a poet, writer and part of the Retro Futurist movement that espoused the rejection of the past while celebrating speed, machinery, violence, youth, industry. Yet, I registered nothing. I walked past the "chicken legs" towers on Vasilevsky Island because a friend lived nearby, and occasionally stopped in front of a striking modernist building. But I never photographed them deliberately, never looked them up, never wondered who made them.

Saint Petersburg remains my favourite city. I absorbed its imperial grandeur along the Neva, its industrial wastelands in Kirovsky raion, its panel housing estates in Yuzhno-Primorsky, the naval architecture of Kronstadt. I loved it. I was also blind to the country’s 20th century history.

This changed one Spring afternoon in Minsk. Waiting for a friend inside the Belarusian State University of Foreign Languages, I finally noticed a piece of beautiful stained glass: the floor-to-ceiling panels made in 1973 by Vasily Samuilovich Chaika, titled Teachers of Different Continents and The World. It registered, briefly, and I took my first-ever photograph of Soviet-era monumental decorative art.

The next day, I visited the Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War. The Minsk Hero City Obelisk soars over you as you approach. Designed by Valentin Zankovich in 1985, its rays of glory jut outward from the spire, the Belarus Mother statue standing watch below. Inside: a monumental glass panel, a stained-glass ceiling, and war-era propaganda on every wall.

Also in Minsk, I made my first deliberate architectural pilgrimage: to the National Library, a massive rhombicuboctahedron whose 1989 design captured everything the late Soviet period did best: utopian geometry, cosmic ambition, and monolithic monumentalism.

I was slowly starting to see. The following year in Armenia and Georgia, I still missed almost everything worth seeing from this civilisation that spanned most of a century: the bus stops, war memorials, and bas-reliefs that colour the urban fabric and rural landscape in their thousands. I was still chasing conventional landmarks. My first photograph of a mosaic was taken in the summer of 2021, in Kyiv.

My first modernist bus stops came in Moldova that same week. In 2022, I returned to Armenia and Georgia with a new purpose: to systematically photograph socialist-era art and architecture. That continued across Central Asia, Mongolia, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Moldova, repeatedly.

This art was designed to be monumental; to make you feel something, or at least be noticed. Yet, I’m not surprised when people tell me they've walked past the same mosaic every day for years or even decades without registering it. For years, I did the same. People now dismiss it as 'old', undesirable, or simply never consider it worth a second glance.

However, once you start seeing its beauty, you can't stop. A kaleidoscope of history, art, and culture opens up. Like a birder, once you learn to identify species, a walk through any park becomes overwhelming with detail you previously filtered out. You start scanning every facade, every roadside junction, every piece of industrial urban landscape full of promises of hidden treasures. Journeys that were once about getting somewhere mapped or known become about what you pass through. Planning trips takes you to the remotest mining towns and the industrial heartlands of cities or districts you’ve never heard of, and few have visited. The uranium mining town of Min-Kush in Kyrgyzstan and mono-industry city of Janatas (Zhanatas) in Kazakhstan to mine phosphates are two such examples.

In February 2026, while searching for people who could tell me more about the monumental-decorative artists of Moldova and Pridnestrovia (officially the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic, better known as Transnistria in English, a de facto independent state the international community considers part of Moldova), I came across the press team from PMR 1, the leading news channel, overheard my conversation with the curator. I ended up being interviewed on television about the tourism potential of socialist heritage – watch the interview in Russian here.

In March 2026, I showed Christopher Herwig (whose books on Soviet bus stops brought this subject to mainstream audiences, including my own) the “hero” bus stops of Pridnestrovia. We passed the first bus stop I'd ever consciously noticed.

Somewhere between Mayakovskaya in Piter’s underground and that last Soviet bus stop in the Moldovan countryside, I went from someone who saw nothing from this lost civilisation, to someone Pridnestrovan state television wanted to interview about what he'd seen from that lost legacy.

The art was always there. The question is whether it will still be there when you start looking. Half of it has already gone, demolished for ideological reasons, cleared for development, or left to decay since the Soviet collapse. The other half is following.

This archive is for the moment before you see clearly. And for making sure there's still something left when you do.