Charlie Warde’s Memorandum series of intaglio etched gold plated copper plates are artworks that preserve memories of buildings and the ideas behind them. These are typically made before the building’s imminent demolition, or, as in this case, their alteration into something that compromises their initial integrity, be it materials or usage.

These small works take the dimensions of an iPhone (PRO 16 Max) screen. Their size invitesclosescrutinythroughtheirfamiliarhandheldproportion. Wardeconductedhis research for the project on a smartphone through Google Maps, responding to Bulgaria’s lost architectural archives, which were seized by the Soviet Army in 1944 and currently remain locked away in Russia despite repeated requests for their return.

Google Maps enabled Warde to explore the buildings’ facades at street level and observe changes made since 2012, through archived user photography. From this communal image source, Warde highlights progressive changes to the buildings in gold, a material at odds with their Modernist style and considered a “dirty” metal by Thomas Moore’s fictional Utopians, who see it as suitable only for use as toilets and adornments to shame prisoners. Warde, like Moor’s Utopians, subvert our common notion of gold’s value, eschewing its decorative associations as useless and undemocratic. Here gold is used to preserve the architectural wounds of the city’s unloved architectural inheritance, and the progressive eradication of its buildings’ features.

Warde questions the ongoing alteration of Sofia’s buildings, insensitivity personalised to their owners’ contemporary needs and tastes, ignoring the fabric of their past. For Warde, architecture is akin to the painterly notion of a background, against which history plays out. With over a decade of practice observing, documenting and offering up for examination the aesthetic and social-utopian tenets of Modernist architecture in the UK and France, Warde here turns his gaze on Sofia, capturing with his work a precious moment in time, a precarious part of Bulgaria’s collective memory, teetering on the edge of, perhaps irreversible, erasure.