CCW Research Staff and Doctoral Students
Workshop title: Tracing the Layers of Historical and Traumatic Events
Where: Academy of Art and Csepel Island, Budapest
When: October 23rd – 29th
Participation
The CCW Graduate School has an on-going collaboration with the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Doctorate School. Balázs Kicsiny has outlined a proposal for a joint project, hosted by the Academy of Art, to be held during the period shown above. The appendices comprise the outline proposal, a brief history of Csepel Island and a text outlining the importance of the area. The team involved in this project is anticipated as comprising one member of research staff (in addition to myself) and up to five doctoral degree students. We are now seeking expressions of interest from those interested in participating in this project. The plan is to arrive in Budapest on Saturday 23rd October, to settle into the city over the weekend, and commence the workshop on Monday 25th . Travel, accommodation and subsistence costs of UK participants will be supported by the CCW Graduate School. The academy is able to accommodate up to 6 participants and the accommodation can be retained for those wishing to stay over for the weekend of 30th and 31st October for sightseeing, etc., in Budapest.
Application
Please submit a short application comprising name and contact details, together with a 100 word statement explaining why this project is relevant to your research and what you believe you can bring to it, by email to Stephen Scrivener, s.scrivener@chelsea.arts.ac.uk.
Deadline date
6th August 2010
Stephen A.R. Scrivener, July 2010
Appendix 1: Outline proposal for workshop
1. Csepel Island Visit. Tracing the layers of historical and traumatic events. Hungarian contemporary art is more and more dominated with socially-engaged art practice. That is why, with the Doctorate School students, I would like to investigate a specific place that preserves the trace of history and communal trauma. During the planned workshop, we will visit a specific area of Budapest. This area played an important role in the history of Budapest and Hungary over the last 100 years as a model of modernisation, revolution, unrest, war, and as a symbol of political and democratic power sharing and ownership. The area is an industrial region of Budapest, called Csepel.
A brief history of the region can be found in Appendix 2 and a detailed history in Appendix 3.
2. Visiting a number of special buildings to reconstruct historical narrative, such as:
a. An emergency building for sheltering from an atom bomb attack, an event anticipated during the cold war. An authentic bunker, with original interior, objects, maps, action plans, left untouched after political change. This exists as a universe unknown to the public, which was designed to enable it occupants to survive the final war, and to live on self sufficiently. b. The (Communist Party) decorator’s world. A storeplace for the totalitarian state’s visual realm. These store rooms are full with the communist regime representational designs: medals, photo albums, statues, awards, gift badges, the remains of the decorations for decorating factories on communist celebration days.
3.Interpretation exercises
Pseudo Design
How does the design of built environment and the interiors of Csepel Island reflect or serve political demand, e.g., a. of the state organized workers society (1949-1956, 1956-1989)? b. of the self organized workers unions (1956)? c. of the privatized formal state-owned factories (1989-2010)?
Visualisation of the state of emergency
How does the design of Csepel Island serve the imagined possible future (life after the bomb, ecological disaster, gas warfare) e.g., a. environment after the disaster? b. environment as a reminder what was before the disaster? c. environment as message of the future? Interpretation from different points of view Each group (one from Budapest and one from London) is asked to separately read, interpret and analyze the visual language evident at Csepel. Then, it is proposed that we will begin to share and translate these different interpretations, each of which reflects individual experience.
Balázs Kicsiny, July 2010
Appendix 2: A brief history of Csepel
This industrial area, which was shaped by modernisation, history and trauma, was founded by Baron Manfred Weiss, a rich Jewish industrialist at the beginning of the 20th Century. The factory’s production was mainly army supplies, which became the most important industry of the Habsburg-Hungarian Monarchy. After Hungary was defeated in the World War I, the founder Weiss committed suicide when he saw how his life’s achievement had been destroyed. Between the two wars the Csepel industries flourished once again , producing army goods under the guidance of Manfréd Weiss family. During World War II, the Weiss family escaped from deportation to the concentration camps with the help of the authorities, and settled in Portugal and in different part of the World. After World War II, the new Stalinist leftish government nationalised the Csepel factories, and the communist-party-led government enforced planned production, as in the Stalinist Soviet Union. As a consequence, workers were forced to work extremely long hours in order to satisfy an artificial propaganda of proletarian paradise. This is why the Island was given the name “Red Csepel.” But the reality was that the workers‘ living standard was sinking deeper and deeper into poverty. That is why even before the ‘56 revolution, strikes were organized by the workers, and during the ‘56 revolution the strongest workers group organized the Revolutionary Workers Council. Their plan was to keep ownership of the factories in the workers’ hand, rejecting Stalinism, but also capitalism as well. After long resistance and armed conflict with Russian troops and Hungarian counter-evolutionary forces, the revolutionary workers capitulated. Some of them were executed, or sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. From 1956 to 1989, the Csepel industrial area played a crucial part in the new totalitarian government’s propaganda as symbol of the proletarian power. The government and communist party officials organized political supervision to undermine the workers’ effort to participate in the decision making. During this time, Hungary was called the state of “Goulash communism,” because, compared with other communist countries, the regime left the individual’s private life relatively free from political supervision, as long as the individual desisted from questioning the role of the ‘56 revolution and other traumatic events which shaped the regime. In 1989, after further political change, the factories of Csepel industrial area were privatised, and the spectacular industrial dynamism and workers’ communities disappeared, leaving its small businesses and warehouses largely as the property of foreign capital. Although the factories are disorientating, the bomb shelters, built in early ‘40‘s, have been left in their original state. One of these, the central officer‘s bunker, is virtually untouched: it is full of objects originating from the World War II period, through the ‘56 ‘60, ‘70’s, up to the late 80’s. The designs (objects, graphics, posters, hand-drawn maps, etc.) are to be found side by side in strange harmony.
Appendix 3 Csepel, Budapest
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