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sensing the city 2024
curatorial project
PLACCC Festival, Budapest, Hungary, 2024
sensing the city 2024
curatorial project
PLACCC Festival, Budapest, Hungary, 2024
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In 2021, PLACCC launched SENSING THE CITY, a series of experimental artistic micro-interventions responding to urgent environmental and ecological issues.
“The city unfolds itself through our senses. We explore our environment, its rythm, atmosphere and texture, but also its current state and the impact of our individual and social practices on the environment through sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. As such, in the projects of SENSING THE CITY, the term “sensing” has a double meaning, as it refers to both the physical perception of the city (the reaction of the body) and the active sensitization of urban locations with the presence of the body.“
In 2024, small-scale projects entered the program through an open call again, and appeared in public – or shared – spaces, engaging agents of urban life, helping to (re)connect to the urban fabric and ecosystem by engaging their different senses.
As it was important to us, the curatorial and artistic team, that the evaluation process is based on the principle of equal opportunities, we asked applicants to send us the concept and project description anonymously. Thus, the jury (Eva Bubla, artist-activist, curator of SENSING THE CITY; Ádám Kobrizsa, citizen, civil engineer, co-founder of Mindspace and co-owner of Lumen Café; Fanni Nánay, artistic director of the PLACCC Festival) assessed the entries in a two-round process. First, the concept, thematic relevance, participatory potential, and the novelty of the anonymous applications were evaluated, and then the shortlisted projects were selected for inclusion in the programme, taking into account the artistic portfolio and professional experience of the applicants.
This year again, each micro-intervention was accompanied by a thematic discussion, with the aim of creating a dialogue between art & science professionals, and bringing the oftentimes overly broad and difficult-to-understand phenomena of climate crisis closer to the public. We believe that the more specific problems that have contributed to and are contributing to the serious environmental problems should be made more comprehensible and understandable by combining the sensitising potential of art with the informative nature of science and their shared discussions.
Participating artists and projects:
Csilla Hódi – lutzz&bog – Planty Warhol: Micro-cruising
Boglárka Jakabfi-Kovács: What you see: a public affair
Viola Mangel: Presence in-between
Anita Patonay – Viktor Bori: Water level
Freund Éva: Layers of Water
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CSILLA HÓDI – LUTZZ&BOG – PLANTY WARHOL: MICRO-CRUISING
Performative Walk
Is something missing from your people-centred cultural bubble? Are you triggered by new ways to get intimate with your surroundings? Would you discover the joys of invisible togetherness with individuals hiding within arm’s reach? Micro-cruising will lure you into the 3 microbial oases of Budapest, giving you the experience of being one and making your urban life more complete.
Cruising – or the intimate use of the city’s more hidden spaces in search of intimacy – is an open, receptive, almost ritualistic way of signalling one’s desire for contact. Their steps slow down, the sense of smell becomes alive, the skin becomes more porous, the touch extends over the entire surface of his body. Micro-cruising reveals the microbial city to us and guides us (back) towards more direct, more symbiotic urban practices. The visuality-centred perception fades away, replaced by the imagination of being with and imagining the micro-robot. In transformative roaming, the vibrations, rumblings and sherterites of the microbes also become audible – through the artistic-scientific translation of the samples collected from them.
In September 2024, you can join the 3 groups of Micro-crusingers and activate your intimate relationship with environmental microbes in Népliget, on Sas-hill and in the Bosnyak Square market. Your translucence will be facilitated by Sensi-wear, special sampling accessories and an audio guide.
Csilla Hódi is a post-disciplinary artist, community organiser and facilitator who experiments with the performativity of art world-making. For the last 9 years she has been practicing co-thinking with mushrooms, including in a travelling mushroom lab.
lutzz&bog is a transdisciplinary artist and performer, her recent work deals with mushrooms, the corporeality of sound, spatiality, collectivity and playful systemic change.
Planty Warhol is a visual artist and mental health practitioner. In his visual work he is also at home with mushroom threads, snails and other living materials, as well as performance and collaborative-speculative creative processes.
Dates and venues:
3 September 2024, 7 PM, Népliget / Meeting point: in front of Planetarium, 1101 Budapest, Népliget
6 September 2024, 6 PM, Sas-hegy / Meeting point: 1112 Budapest, crossing of Őrség street and Dayka Gábor street
7 September 2024, 10 AM, Bosnyák Square Market / Meeting point: Bolgárkertészek memorial place, 1149 Budapest, Bosnyák tér
Talk on microbial art & science, 6 September 2024
Participants: the artists and dr. István Parádi, plant biologist, adjunct professor at the Department of Plant Biology and Molecular Plant Biology, ELTE TTK
Moderator: Marietta Mogyorósy, landscape and horticultural engineer, nature facilitator
Photo: Attila Balogh
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ANITA PATONAY – VIKTOR BORI: WATER LEVEL
Participatory Theatre Play
Tamás Rojik’s youth novel Drought is the starting point of our project. The novel is set in 2050 and presents a dystopia focusing on global warming. The author projects the consequences of this on Budapest and Hungary, e.g.: the streets of Budapest are no longer worth walking on because people’s skin is burning, the lakes in Hungary have disappeared… In the world depicted, both the environment and society are struggling to survive. The country is governed by decrees. There are strict rules on the use of water and on all the activities that can protect our environment, that try to slow down this process, the process of warming, because a situation of water scarcity is creating a crisis.
Our participatory theatre play, Water Level, addresses the audience as a community, who actively participate in the theatre play, the objective of which is to give them a visceral experience of what happens in society, in their environment, when there is a water shortage in the country, when they are told how to ration drinking water and what happens when they don’t know what the truth really is. The game uses the participants’ imagination and help to build a world of fiction, a world of water scarcity in Hungary in 2040. In this fictional world, they have to make decisions in order to live the gravity of the situation and think about how they should react to the social crisis of global warming in their world today.
Perspektíva Drama Workshop was founded by Anita Patonay in 2023 with the aim of creating an intellectual workshop where actor-drama teachers with decades of experience in drama education work to enable children, young people and adults to meet themselves, their peers and social issues through the diverse tools of drama education and theatre education. Their mission is to enable participants to experience in their communities that their opinions matter, that they have a voice, that they have a voice to act. “We believe that through stories we can make sense of the world around us, and ourselves in it, more easily. We learn about the world through stories.”
Roles:
Environmental Inspector: Viktor Bori
Professor Dr. Orsolya Szalay: Anita Patonay
Contributor to the discussion on “water futures” following the art project: Bence Fülöp, hydraulic engineer, water management expert
Moderator: Marietta Mogyosósy, landscape and horticultural engineer, nature facilitator
Photo: Attila Balogh
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BOGLÁRKA JAKABFI-KOVÁCS: WHAT YOU SEE – A PUBLIC AFFAIR
Participatory Public Art Installation
The various urban developments are determined and planned by the values of current economic policy, and these values can be read on our public spaces. If our visible world is the tip of the iceberg, what do our public spaces say about our society, our shared values and our relationship with the living world? What kind of vision lies at the bottom of the iceberg at the tip of which, in a European capital, a mall is built on a public square and a tower block on a riverbank?
Space robbery and misappropriation is not a private matter for property developers and investors, but a public matter in the purest sense. The social space is part of the urban silhouette, of the spectacle itself. Therefore, any change that has a significant impact on the urban landscape is a public matter. Tower blocks that change the urban skyline, shopping malls and parcels of land cleared from urban forests turn social space into transport or consumer space. By contrast, well-functioning urban spaces also provide opportunities for encounter and leisure. There are a number of factors that make a place a place to stay, and the installation aims to draw attention to the evidence that public space is necessary. The space that is not taken, that is, the place itself. The installation, consisting of plexiglass mounted on building scaffolding, draws attention to the abduction of space in an interactive way. Entering the scaffolding, the contours of the buildings likely to be constructed on the site complete the view (for example, more high-rise buildings on the Kopaszi Dam, a mall at the Puskás Stadium).
The visitor is made aware of the importance of open public space and its fragility.
Boglárka Jakabfi-Kovács graduated in Architecture from MOMÉ in 2012 and is currently writing her doctoral thesis. Her research interests include sustainable design strategy building based on systems thinking, the architectural aspects of the paradigm of non-growth and the integration of the above into design education. She is a regular speaker at national and international conferences. As an external lecturer he teaches courses on climate adaptation, adaptive reuse, gamification and systems design at the MOME Institute of Architecture and at the Budapest Metropolitan University. He is a founding member of the Ecological Film Workshop, where they make documentary films about the country’s water management problems. His family house, designed in collaboration with Marp studio, won the House of the Year Grand Prize and Big See Award in 2020.
Talk on Disappearing Public Spaces & Growing Urban Developments, 5 September 2024
Participants: artist and András Lányi writer
Moderator: Péter Hámori, architect, GUBAHÁMORI
Photo: Attila Balogh / Balázs Jakabfi
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EVA FREUND: LAYERS OF WATER
Public Art Installation and Workshop
One of the important challenges of our time, especially for the metropolitan way of life, is to reconnect with the complexity of our inherent analog nature, to rehabilitate the richness of perception and emotional relationships. Digital stimuli involve fewer senses, leave a duller memory than analogue stimuli, but are as limitless as the medium of water that makes up much of our bodies.
Layers of Water aims to speak to us at a level as basic (archaic and elemental) as water, because the impulses of the digital world are similar: whether they are images, sounds or other information, they are often not easily filtered and we often feel overwhelmed by them.
The symbolic meaning of the filter layers used in the project allows visitors to engage personally with the process of filtering, so that, in addition to the layer of moving image projected onto the installation, filtering water can become a more complex experience, reflecting the difference in complexity between digital and analogue stimuli.
The layers of the filter:
– Gravel layer(s): remove larger impurities. Meditation: cleansing the foundations
– Sand layer: removes the finer impurities, symbolizing the deeper washing through of our lives
– Activated Charcoal: Removes organic compounds and odours, symbolising the possibility of freedom from worries and spiritual renewal
– Tissue or cotton: Removes the finest particles, symbolizing the filtering of our most saturated layers
The filtered water can be poured into cups and water bottles.
In a workshop that complements the installation, we make our own water filters and try out different aspects of filtration.
Talk on the various layers of water issues, 8 September 2024, 6 PM
Participants: the artist and dr. Dóra Gere, chemist, water hygiene expert, National Centre for Public Health and Pharmacy, Ármin Tillmann, philosopher
Moderator: Cili Lohász, VALYO – City and River Association
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VIOLA MANGEL: PRESENCE IN-BETWEEN
Public Art Installation
Underpasses are characterised by emptiness due to the lack of aesthetics and personality, and emptiness is uncomfortable. You cannot relate to it. Yet, paradoxically, the lack of identity and the emptiness that we experience in these places can bring us closer to unity; we can identify with the space and with ourselves. In the loneliness and anxiety present in impersonal, holodic spaces – the non-places – we find the aesthetics of nothingness, the alternation of what is and what is not.
The public installation Presence in-between is a light installation that pulsates to the rhythm of breathing, helping us to experience being present, to connect with the environment. The installation “inhabits” an urban non-place and offers a different interpretation: that non-places could actually function as zen-places. As the visitors passes through the space, they can stop for a moment and take in its rhythm, breathe with it.
Viola Mangel is a student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She has started working on public art projects recently, exploring the contrast between the pulsation of urban life and Zen Buddhism that plays an important role in her own life.