Memento

"Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes"
Italo Calvino from "Le città invisibili"

After the fall of the communist regime in Hungary in 1989, many communist statues and monuments were removed. In 1991 the General Assembly of Budapest decided to place all the statues removed in an outdoor museum, and held a competition that was won by the Hungarian architect Ákos Eleőd.
The park was built in 1992-1993 in the XXII district of the capital.

“These statues are a part of the history of Hungary. Dictatorships chip away at and plaster over their past in order to get rid of all memories of previous ages. Democracy is the only regime that is prepared to accept that our past with all the dead ends is still ours; we should get to know it, analyse it and think about it!
All of the statues, therefore, were positioned according to the original sculptural and architectural plans.
This park is not about the statues or the sculptors, but a critique of the ideology that used these statues as symbols of authority.
I realised that if I made this park with more direct, drastic and real tools, as many thought I should, I would create an anti-propaganda park from these propaganda statues and in doing this, I would be faithfully following the same recipe and mentality that we inherited from dictatorship."
Ákos Eleőd, Hungarian architect responsible for designing Statue Park.