Fading Laughter

A swing moves without a child, pushed only by wind through the skeletal remains of what was once a carousel. The metal creaks—a sound that might have been joyful accompaniment to laughter, now a lonely percussion against silence. This is the world Mara Kovačić inhabits in Fading Laughter, her haunting photographic series that transforms abandoned playgrounds into monuments of absence. Across her lens, jungle gyms become geometric sculptures against empty skies, concrete slides emerge like brutalist artifacts half-buried in weeds, and seesaws balance nothing but the weight of time itself.

Kovačić, the Croatian-born artist whose eye for stark beauty has garnered international attention, doesn't simply document decay—she excavates memory from forgetting. Each photograph in the series captures spaces built explicitly for joy, now inhabited only by their own echoes. There's something deeply unsettling about this inversion: playgrounds, those most optimistic of human constructions, rendered as monuments to abandonment. Yet Kovačić's lens finds unexpected poetry in this contradiction, revealing how structures designed for the most ephemeral human experience—childhood play—become the most enduring testaments to its passing.

The series spans continents, from urban lots in forgotten European suburbs to rural schoolyards where grass grows through basketball hoops. What unites these disparate locations is Kovačić's consistent eye for geometry and atmosphere. She isolates these playground elements against their environments with surgical precision: a red slide cutting through overgrown green, swing chains forming perfect verticals against chaotic urban skylines, merry-go-rounds creating circles of rust and chipped paint that seem to spin even in stillness.

But Fading Laughter operates on deeper frequencies than mere aesthetic documentation. These playgrounds become metaphors for cultural and personal archaeology—the layers of community life that accumulate and erode around the places we build for our children. Each rusted monkey bar and weather-beaten seesaw carries the invisible imprint of thousands of small hands, the ghost choreography of games whose rules are now forgotten. Kovačić suggests that childhood itself leaves behind infrastructures we never fully dismantle, spaces that outlive the people they were meant to serve.

The work arrives at a moment when discussions about urban decay and forgotten spaces have become central to contemporary photography. Artists like Camilo José Vergara and Yves Marchand have made careers documenting architectural ruins, while photographers like Todd Hido find beauty in suburban desolation. But Kovačić's focus on playgrounds distinguishes her approach. Where others might seek the grandeur of collapsed theaters or abandoned factories, she finds her subjects in the everyday architecture of childhood—spaces that were never meant to be permanent, yet somehow endure as the most poignant reminders of impermanence.

There's a particular melancholy to playground abandonment that differs from other forms of architectural decay. Factories close due to economic forces; theaters shut down when culture shifts. But playgrounds are abandoned when communities themselves fade—when schools close, when families move away, when the children who gave these spaces meaning simply grow up and move on. Kovačić captures this unique form of loss, where the absence isn't just of people, but of the particular kind of unselfconscious joy that belongs exclusively to childhood.

In reframing these forgotten spaces as sculptural objects, Fading Laughter asks uncomfortable questions about what societies choose to preserve and what they allow to crumble. Museums carefully maintain artifacts of adult ambition—art, architecture, monuments to power. But the infrastructure of childhood play is left to rust and decay, as if we've collectively agreed that the spaces where we first learned to navigate the world aren't worth preserving.

Kovačić's photographs suggest otherwise. In her hands, these abandoned playgrounds become altars to memory, reminders that the geometries of childhood—circles, slides, swings—are as deserving of documentation as any cathedral. They are, after all, the first public spaces most of us ever knew, our earliest encounters with architecture designed not for efficiency or grandeur, but purely for joy. That such spaces are now silent only makes their echoes more profound.

Fading Laughter will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb through March 2026, with a traveling exhibition planned for select European venues.