As a Hungarian citizen, it became essential to me to reconsider this notion as the Hungarian government views the country as Europe’s bulwark, the defending border. They have been conducting a determined, aggressive anti-migrant campaign for years driving people’s opinion in a really exclusionary way. At the Serbian-Hungarian border, illegal human trafficking has been constant in the past years. In the vicinity of the border crossing, numerous abandoned and burnt cars could be found as remnants of police chases.
Delving into the concept of borders between countries, especially through the edge of the Schengen area, Us, living on the crust delivers an attempt to discover what the journey of becoming an outsider might mean today.
The photo series is based on a poem I wrote that can be interpreted in three ways. I combined the description of an illegal border-crossing process with my personal thoughts on boundaries.
The Hungarian far-right party (called MiHazánk) held a demonstration on the 11th of november in 2023 at the border, advocating for the reinforcement of the border barrier. I traveled there to capture photographs at the event and around the Schengen border.
I used various digital techniques to take the images. I was aiming to expand the boundaries of human vision across the electromagnetic spectrum to highlight our physical barriers and the pettiness of humans. I scanned each image from a small LCD screen from different perspectives. Highlighting the pixels that way allowed me to break down the photos to more defined units. Furthermore I reprocessed images taken from space. These photos were also taken in different spectra like ultraviolet, infra and so on.
For the installation I made two types of uniquely modified LCD screens. I designed the displays to make a strong connection with the topic itself.
A short summary with photos about the installations can be found on the following link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TDObLpc_9uSwdQ-m2CyLvdN4luSgJF1a/view?usp=share_link