The Smohay Award, presented by the Smohay Foundation—administered by the King Saint Stephen Museum in Székesfehérvár—was awarded to Dorottya Szonja Koltay in 2025.
“I Pitched a Tent Inside My Mother” is a journey of self-discovery that functions not as a traditional travel guide, but as an internal and external map. Set against the pitted, dense, and grotesque reality of the Carpathian Basin, it explores how to survive in the domestic wilderness. It invites the traveler—who has even reached the bottom of the pit—on an adventure to discover practices that circumvent subjugation and methods of cooperation within the constricting yet sustaining environment represented by our own roots. What kind of protection is it that grants freedom without tying one down? Is it the tribal chief who buries you, so that you may learn to grow beyond the earth?
To survive in this extreme environment, the conscious “crafting” of words and sentences is essential, for language is the compass that helps us draw boundaries between horror and clarity. When gauging borderline situations, we must look precisely where home has already become a reservation, but the wilderness is still unknown, the outside world is chaotic and ever-changing, while an artificially maintained order reigns within the fence. Before we drive out our mother as well as every other wild creature we cannot domesticate—or before we mark off the steppe as far as the eye can see—the exhibition invites us to create a resource for staying at home.
We must continually examine our own habits and ingrained reflexes to understand what we have inherited and what we have built ourselves—yet from which we still wish to break free. By casting aside our grandfathers’ manuals on how to rid ourselves of scoundrels, how do we learn to pitch a tent in which we are happy to stay?