Sentimental Monument (project description)
 
Based on personal memories, evoking the rural object culture of the 80s (porcelain figurines forming chicken backs) and recycling it (rotor made from scythe blades).

Porcelains: typical object culture of my grandparents’ generation both in towns and in the country. Mass-produced articles, the same pieces could be purchased, there were hardly any unique ones, thus it was not about the passion for collecting, but some similar porcelain collections simply belonged to the fittings of the home, like the black-and-white television with the room aerial.

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Chickenback: the cheapest meat which has therefore become the symbol of the vulnerable, impecunious, mainly pensioner stratum. In the case of Sentimental Monument, the cheapest food base, the ephemeral waste containing hardly any nutritious value functions as a time capsule made from an enduring, noble material. Each piece is hand-painted, thus here they are not mass-produced articles, but make up a real collection. 

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Scythe: means my parents’ generation to me.  In the peasant culture the scythe is a symbol of the daily food produced with hard work. It could also function as the main weapon in an uprising. The slow rotation of the blades reminds of the rotors of wind power plants seen over the wheat-fields. It can be compared with one of the recent commands, recycling- on one hand the material itself (steel blades), on the other hand the energy (scything: manpower, which is limited versus renewable energy, wind, which is unlimited). The scythe is often the symbol of death, too, which in this case refers to the cycle of life.

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Labels: the last few words of the epigram Huszt (1831) by the Hungarian poet Ferenc Kölcsey: Do, create, enrich, which continues: and the country will arise. In the poem, learnt by heart by Hungarian students, the author calls our attention to the future instead of the past. The 19th-century lines were often used as a slogan in the socialist era, encouraging the people to actively take part in maintaining and strengthening the system. The manifestation of the individual is undesirable, instead, the submissive agreement with the directives is expected, therefore the meaning of the words is different:
do: be effective, do it (we can do it together)
create: improve, build (we will build it together)
enrich: add to it, make it bigger (united we stand, divided we fall)

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This somewhat harmonizes with the manifestations of „correct behaviour” found in recent political rhetoric.

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From an artist’s standpoint the scythes rotating with labels can represent the depressing blade of the pressure to create, but a new value is produced through creating.

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The typography of the three words: cultural layers, similar to onion skin. This links porcelains to rotors. Layers of the meanings of now symbolic former consumer and fancy goods (politico-cultural) and of words: isolation- soviet influence; opening borders-dumping of goods from the Far-East; migration-the appearance of Arabic culture. Past and present permeating each other. In typography it is a well traceable process from Cyrillic script through Chinese symbols to Arabic calligraphy.