Remake I-X.

To tell the truth, I was really stunned by the riots of the autumn of 2006. Not because I cannot accept that there can be unforeseen dramatic, tragicomical or even bizarre events during the historical evolution of a state. Rather because I had to face the fact, that we, the citizens of this country, carry along with us such a political, philosophical burden, filled with contradictions that still haven’t been pointed out nor solved. We have had enough of politics interfering with our intimate sphere, but the events tell us that we are too apolitical.

We turn our heads away too often…We don’t put any questions…Don’t fight for our rights…

Nevertheless in private or in pubs we do have an opinion. Still, we live our lives as it didn’t concern us what goes on in our surroundings. Now we can see the result of this.

Let us not be guilty of the same mistake again, let us face the facts, because the facts reflect what we are.

The demonstrators claimed to be making history. They never took notice of the fact that all what was happening was an embarrassing remake of the events that had occurred in 1956.

Why could all this happen? Are they the only ones responsible? I don’t think so. There is something wrong with our concepts about political and social issues in general. The transmitter and interpreter of the images of reality is mainly the media. Nevertheless those images and interpretations are chaotic, contradictory or even manipulated. In this case it is not a great help that this happens everywhere.

Face magazine released in the September of 2001 a fashion material in which the models were dressed as terrorists, absurdly foretelling the events of the next weeks. In 2006 the Hungarian Television advertised itself with a billboard having the following slogan: “If you were a revolutionist, which television would you conquer?” I don’t want to suggest that this provocative sentence foretold the further events. The slogan didn’t cause the later siege of the Hungarian Television, but both are important components of the same phenomenon.

The story of the stolen tank is somewhat similar. It should have been a didactic device or scenery, but functioned as the guns in theatre: if we see a gun on the stage in the first act, it will be fired during the play for sure.

As the slogan made up of huge letters and erected on Erzsébet Square ( Budapest the capital of liberty) ended up in a different context. The demonstrators used the word LIBERTY as barricade against the riot police.

In other words, the events couldn’t be controlled anymore and reality became unreality.

I picked ten stories out of all this. The starting point of each scene is a motion picture seen in the media, a private video, or my own visual experiences. All stories will be realized as animations, but different in technique and style. I chose the animation as medium, because it isn’t even slightly documentarist, the cruel naturalism of the technical images being unknown to it. (Drawing, manual creation is still an important element of animations although most creative processes are controlled by computer.) This medium can become a device to alienate the facts in order to analyze them artistically, because it can concentrate and interpret the events from a different point of view. With the help of animation I plan to create the ironic remake of the political farce of last autumn.

The stories will be realized in co-production with more animation artists, so as to insert different artistic characters besides my own. (Obviously I need the cooperation of other people to realize these projects technically as well.) The stories follow each other in loose chronological order, thus the visitors will have to process from left to right. In the dark space the size of the projected motion pictures will be altering. The surfaces that will be projected at will be scattered in space. One will be able to watch only one animation from a certain point of view, this way no interference will exist either in image or in sound. The animations will get started one by one.

. Nemes Csaba