On 6 April 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, with support from Italy and Hungary. The kingdom was created in December 1918, in the aftermath of the First World War, as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires collapsed. It was impelled by the dream of an independent nation for the southern Slavs—the “Yugo Slavs,” culturally related ethnicities and nationalities of the Balkans—and brought together Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, Slovenians and others. By the start of the Second World War, however, long-standing communal grievances and resentment against Serbian domination had severely weakened the union. It succumbed to the Axis powers, and was divided up between them.
This set off colossal carnage. New governments in the occupied territories pursued genocide against people of supposedly foreign ethnicity. In the Independent State of Croatia, for instance, an extreme-right government systematically murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, alongside Roma and political dissidents. Resistance movements of various stripes soon rose up, but these fought each other at least as violently as they did the occupying forces. Eventually, the Yugoslav Partisans, commanded by the communist Josip Broz Tito and calling for Yugoslav unity, took control of the liberation struggle.
In 1953, Tito became the first president of a socialist Yugoslavia that united six nominally autonomous republics—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. To commemorate the struggle, and what he saw as a shared Yugoslav history, Tito commissioned prominent artists to create hundreds of spomeniks on the sites of concentration camps, atrocities and battles. Their futuristic, brutalist style diverged profoundly from the socialist realism of memorials elsewhere in the post-war Communist states, and eschewed depictions of people—likely an attempt to circumvent the ethnic dimensions of many of the events memorialised. Until Tito’s death in 1980, and Yugoslavia’s subsequent unravelling, the spomeniks were symbols of Yugoslav unity.
By the time Kempenaers began his project, years of blood-letting had wholly transformed their meaning. Today, they are enormous effigies of Tito’s dream, trapped in countries vehemently denying any claims upon their territories by their neighbours. Many have been purposely damaged or defaced, and almost all are neglected. At some sites, Kempenaers found nothing but empty space where spomeniks once stood. The sculptures had been obliterated, like the national project they once stood for.