“Was it that men ought never to have been created at all, but should have remained mere clay? Or that, though their creation was necessary, they ought to have been made in some other fashion, and not in this?”
Lucian of Samosata, Prometheus, or the Caucasus (translated by H. W. Fowler)
There are five of us left, artists and friends for 17 years. We wanted to step out of our ordinary lives, if only for a limited period of time. We didn’t know exactly why, nor did we know exactly what would happen there. We wanted to transform into a different form, we wanted to move into a different state.
It all began with digging a hole in a field. Mud provided the opportunity for the metamorphosis. A human body steeped in mud suspends the conditions of civilised human existence, a human body completely covered in mud is only half human – half something else. Nature, matter, instinct – neither good nor bad.
Those of us, who we cover in mud, are the ones who enter this transitory state, the ones who crawl back into the earth. As soon as he is transformed into a Mudman, he becomes someone else: a different version of himself, depending on the situation. Monster, golem, earth, crooked lover, grotesque puppet – and so much more.
The figure thus created by transformation is tested in various conditions, creating new images and situations. This gives us both freedom and a chance to reflect on our own lives.
We were drawn by the earth: lower and lower, deeper,
drawn by the mud: to slip into it, to transform.
To where experience can no longer be put into words.
“What is life? Dirt.
And what is human in it? Gold in the dirt.”
Zsigmond Móricz, Gold in the Mud
Some of the works presented in the exhibition are photographs that capture this creature formed through transformation. The other part of the works are glazed, fired ceramic heads, which are grotesque, distorted, yet at the same time funny and clumsy manifestations of the Mudman. The installation, presented together with pieces of furniture—refined, traditional forms of human civilization—reveals one of the central motifs of the works: harmony based on opposites.
The exhibition presents the Mud project, created through the collaboration of five Hungarian visual artists. The artists (Péter Bátory, János Brückner, Máté Fillér, Ottó Szabó, Márton Emil Tóth) have been working together for 17 years under the name We Didn’t Do It! Crew, producing numerous art projects in Hungary and internationally. The project titled Mud / Sár began in 2020 with the short film Yellow Soil of Kömlőd. Since then, it has continuously developed as an artistic practice based on performance, video, photography, and installation. At the center of this project lies transformation, the experience of a state that is only half human, and experimentation with the possibilities offered by a raw, nature-bound material—mud.
Special thanks:
Pálinkás Dominika
Pengő János