Oktoberhaz - a blogger in Hungary
This is a selection of writings and
pictures I put together over the
past 3 years in Hungary - mainly its capital city, Budapest, but also
in the Alföld region in the East of the country - the uncovering
of a
blogger's intimate sphere, whose commitment and responsibility I
propose to discuss more openly here.
Budapest, New Year's eve, 31st of
December 2007
It's always ironic for someone to start photography on his first
experience abroad. The need for photographic practice very often
derives from feelings of fear, loneliness or foreignness. It is there
for simple reasons if you are still looking for light, colours and
contrasts; a struggle against representation, at the same time a kind
of tragedy: sacrificing the pleasure of results and frames for more
effort and walking. So for whom are we - bloggers, travellers and
picture-takers - collecting this massive data? This is a question worth
asking as over the years we learn to travel more and more through the
camera obscura.
"Smell of
tobacco in the plastic chairs
Soda in your
cheap wine
Good wine is
for food
Old coffee
resting amidst the fumes
of menthol
cigarettes
of mosquitoes from the Tissza
The dog is
wailing for company
We recite our
week's walks and encounters
How was work,
where is the wine?
Home-mades
and home-stomachs
Glory be for
a bit of kocsmálya*
in my memory
box
Oh for a
good wine discussion"
- Posted on September the 18th 2008.
I was told by my girlfriend, who is a Hungarian national, that this
description of her father's kocsmálya (* which stands
for "his pub"), one I wrote on my return to London, made her very sad.
She found words of plastic, fumes, cigarettes and mosquitoes hard to
take in a poem about home. She didn't go any further and eventually
swept the matter away, as those were my own words, my own images. Of
course this didn't satisfy me. I keep on reflecting on the kind of
criticisms I receive when I decide to picture the debris of a
broken-down building. They don't just stem from a sense of harmony
between a population and a government's politics of representation, nor
simply from a sense of national pride. To me, it's a gap in between
pride and history. The no-man lands of construction and the
marginalised bits of history lie behind the big Puma or McDonald's
banners, and those kilometres of temporary walls are symbolic holes in
a country having to imagine its future at extra euro-speed. (The irony
of an outsider's position, to seek those symbolic cracks around the
city whilst through his own country the wind of finance blows down an
economy so fragile) The advertisement banners and temporary walls on
the way to university, to the supermarket, to the bank, to the bar, to
bed, to the night-job, to the tube... those banners stay up, reflected
everywhere in the plastic colours left by Soviet history. They stay up,
and mirrors are everywhere that tell history in their own moments.
Martfü, Alföld region, 3rd
of January 2009
Colours at Loss
their profile
was well chosen
colour was as
golden as branch
words were
leaves drafting dust
and his was a
shadow of doubt
The tree of
their body
gave way to
the cold window
instantly
travelling away
to the east,
Hortobágyi train
the pale blue
of the wood
they left on
the window sill
was like a
bottle on a bench
words of
solitude
- Posted on December the 7th 2008
Budapest, 31st of May 2007
It's a cold December afternoon and I feel a reproachful gaze breezing
past me towards the hills of Buda standing in the mist. When I stand in
the Pest side of the Hungarian capital, there is an unavoidable tension
in the air drawing from the hills opposite. A duality resonating in the
Danube's valley, a duality of a country's history, tensions of
generations and times. Such is the atmosphere that recalls to me now
the beginning of a phrase by the late writer Márai Sándor
as he walks in the ruins of post World War II Buda, and in his memories
recalls going down this hill he would never climb up later again: "as I
was about to descend the Granite stairs to return to the world in ruins
below." (*)
It was a world in ruins while shiny cars and French jewelry were being
parachuted like Marshall plan shells, while a country's sovereignty was
drifting in the air in the fumes of fallen bridges, soon to be
overshadowed by the red flags of victorious Soviets. 'The Slavs', this
barbarian east Márai describes that Hungary was forced into, a
culture's representation pushed further out when the 'Iron Curtain' - a
political turn imagined as this solid metaphor by Winston Churchill -
symbolically fell in the 1990s, and tourists rushed into the thermal
baths of Pest, who had been designated as the wash-basins of Ostalgia
[or 'Nostalgia for the East'].
"After World War II pessimists endowed with imaginative power likened
Europe to such a ruined house with an unscathed façade" (*)
- Written in Budapest, December 2008
Train from Szolnok to Martfü -
Alföld region, 4th of September 2008
Framing a struggle
Familiar signs appear around me as I raise my eyes in streets of
North-East Pest or the London underground. In a corridor at University
waiting for exam-time or on the staff-board... A Hungarian name, a
label that reads 'made in Hungary', and the complexities those words
swallow for our good use.
Further on I am searching for colours of those very grounds that
project those signs. History bares no dress when one is shy and curious
at the same time, colours referring to the unsaid, to the patterns of
life and craft of passing time, which itself is no pure human gift.
There is a sense in which we re-create time as representations go, but
the responsibility is so complex there is no one road to it.
Responsibility means having the time, means of travelling and walking,
and making use of this time in that elsewhere constructed as an
observer. Of course such poetics are a choice, but is it possible to
reduce the image to mere personal experience when it comes to such
media-spaces as blogging?
This is not to say - it would be absurd of me - that each picture is an
ethical choice. Instead, this is merely the reflection upon me of my
experience as well as the reflection of the eyes of passers-by looking
dubiously at me for choosing this particular place and scaffolding or
bus tire to stop and observe. They cannot be disconnected, as much as a
digital picture is only rarely reserved 'private' today. Hungarian is a
great language to play with associations - being so unique, some words
are found in other languages but with completely different meaning -
and the word 'ami' is a very relevant example for me here. It both
means "that which is" in Hungarian and "friend" in French. Similar to
the effort of translation, in blogging I take it as both an
affectionate relationship on my behalf to a certain place and people,
as well as a sense of this very place, a part of it. In practice: a
drive towards respect.
- Posted on December the 21st 2008
Budapest, Újpest, 4th of
November 2007
Sweeping the
street he dresses his frame
In a theatre
for the cold
And whenever
he stops the light comes in
Place
reflected in his everywhere
Sweeping into
the street they dress that fame
A theatre of
gold
And whenever
they disappear with pens of silver
Space is
nowhere but in the heart
Of the street
colour's metteur en scène
- Written in Budapest, January 2009.
Media-responsibilities are in transition, participation is everywhere
and young adults finishing their studies run the risk of falling sick
of the human record. Blogs are the bastard-children of the
possibilities left by an era of words sinking in rivers, while rivers
sing out the words in a language we are too busy to get to grips with.
This blog, reflection of place as much as it reflects the media space I
participate in, is a reflection of and on this era of blogging and
self-propelling media that risks the exclusion of a real understanding
of place.
"One is always ashamed when one finds out he is not a hero but a dupe:
a dupe of History" (* Márai Sándor Memoirs of Hungary
1944-48)
I leave you with the mark of a bourgeois yet brilliant writer of his
time (indeed Márai himself stresses who can write but the
bourgeoisie? The deal is different now, but his commentary leaves a
trace on the meaning of our travels to the east, the south and those
poles of others' existence), a poet dressing up the times of transition
between two wars, while at this very hour a war is being waged
simultaneously in the streets of Gaza and on my contacts' Facebook
status. The colours are grey indeed in this October house.
Based on the blog "an Eastern feather
flies around"
http://oktoberhaz.blogspot.com/
Dylan originally discovered digital photography together with blogging, which allows him to keep on writing with a freedom he enjoys. In the past years during his degree in Anthropology and Media this has taken on a different - ethical - meaning but he wants to develop this reflexive and 'amateur' format as he values its potential. He is originally from countryside Brittany in France, born in a family of musicians and dancers.his heart rooted in South African gospel.