Memorials between Ruination and Evacuation

Nonument! Symposium Ljubljana

Miloš Kosec

From the avant-garde experiments with memorialising revolutions to the anti-monuments of Jochen Gerz, the development of memorials throughout the 20th century largely followed the general fragmentation of certainties. The experience of the Holocaust redefined the scale of memorialisation as well as redirected the conceptual emphasis of monuments towards the missing, the absent, the invisible. But is the age of the retreat of the monument over, and if so, why? Miloš Kosec’s lecture examines the competition proposal for the recent Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial (2016) in order to contextualise the contemporary discourse on memorialisation of absence.

Watch the video of Miloš Kosec’s lecture at the 2018 Nonument! Symposium in Ljubljana.


Miloš Kosec is an architect, editor and publicist living and working in London, UK and in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Currently, he is conducting research for his PhD project at Birkbeck, London. In 2013 he published the book Ruin as an Architectural Object. His research is focused on architecture, architectural history, political and social aspects of architectural design. Miloš is also a practicing architect and landscape designer as well as a member of the editorial boards of Praznine and Outsider magazines.