Franciska Legát: HELLISH EDEN

Franciska Legát: Hellish Eden series What was the Hungary my parents grew up in like? Cruel compared to the West, humane compared to its neighbours, absurd from today's perspective, and somehow charming when seen in old pictures. My parents grew up in the socialist Hungary. Many people from their and my grandparents' generation look back to this era with nostalgia, claiming that everything used to be better. My mother told me stories about her idyllic childhood, her hometown, Salgótarján, and…

Serendipitous Connections: Remnants of Ballet and Rocks of the West Coast

Raisa Foster Under history, memory and forgetting. Under memory and forgetting, life. But writing a life is another story. Incompletion. – Paul Ricoeur Starting as a senior grant researcher in the Re-connect / Re-collect project at the beginning of October brought in to view connections between my childhood memories and Cold War histories, and my life as an artist and a scholar. I have to admit that I have never been interested in history; however, I have always been fascinated by memories: autobiographies of…

A Whale of a Bad Time: Memory for Sustainable Futures

Graphic Design: Compact This blog is a thought experiment for the exhibition titled A Whale of a Bad Time. Curator: Zsófia Kókai and Exhibiting artists: Ivor Almásy, István Felsmann, Sára Gink-Miszlivetz, Katalin Kortmann-Járay, Karina Mendreczky, Balázs Máté Tóth, Márton Emil Tóth. I visited this exhibition in September 2020 with an interest to explore connections with our Reconnect / Recollect project. The exhibition portrays the 90s generations' childhood memories. While remembering childhood, the past, present and future meet. In the process of remembering, images…

‘EAST’ Premiere in Budapest

Spacetime Provocations with Childhood Memories With overwhelming success, the play ‘KELET/EAST’ premiered to a full house in Trafo Theatre on September 22-23, 2020 in Budapest, Hungary. Performed by Dollardadd’s theater group, the play was inspired by childhood memories of the post/socialist periods produced as a part of the Recollect / Reconnect project.  The play tells the story of Roland who won the 1986 Talent Show in Hungary for his clown performance and received a much coveted award - a trip…

Summer in the Delta: A braided journey through space and time

by Simona Szakács-Behling The story I’m about to tell is a story in three acts based on my memories of travelling with my grandfather from Bucharest to his native village of CA Rossetti in the Danube Delta during several summers in the early 1990s. I must have been between eight and eleven years old, at a time when I thought that adults are not afraid of anything and they never feel pain – not even when they go to the…