Since the fall of communism in Hungary in 1989, and the consequent withdrawal of Soviet forces, the significance of the Soviet legacy has been contested by different actors on the political stage. Part of this legacy is the social dislocation and economic decline that was precipitated by the end of socialism. Visually, this has translated into abandoned and dilapidated buildings and infrastructure on a seemingly post-apocalyptic scale. Revisionism continues today. Since 2013, the present Hungarian government has been actively engaged in it through visual means in the civic spaces—street names, statues, buildings, and cultural institutions. How do these successive and continuing revisions of historical narrative affect the semiotic reading of contemporary and archival photographs of urban Hungary? This article draws on documentary evidence as well as the author’s own experience of growing up in post-communist Hungary, to contextualise both archival photographs and the author’s own current photographic practice.

Falling (2017) is a short experimental film which expresses, through poetry, the relationship between man and nature, particularly mankind’s impact on the environment – never-ending exploitation, leaving the world bare. The 1970s archive footage, which hails the ingenuity and benefits of industrial agriculture, lays exposed and ruined like its consequences. Salvaged archive footage from Congo’s national archives is reinterpreted through Giovanni Pascoli’s poem, The Fallen Oak (1907). The poem describes labourers intent on their goal of chopping down an oak tree for firewood, who are, at first, oblivious of the consequences, and then unwilling to change their minds until it is too late. Through her PhD research project, the film’s director is involved in the digitisation of documentaries from the National Film Archives of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where much of the filmmaking in the 1970s was dedicated to modernisation, particularly the national development of industrial crop harvesting and other agricultural processes. The original footage comprises 16mm films that have suffered over forty years of a tropical climate and intermittent storage, turning the film into atmospheric archaeological media records.

Sweat, data and liquid assets is concerned with the bodily aspect of online click work. The project consists of a series of short, open-ended texts written by workers on the platform Microworkers about their embodied experience of labouring as microtaskers. The questions workers were asked to reflect on relate to which parts of their bodies were currently active, what sensations they were noticing, emotions that they were feeling and where these were located in the body. In addition to the texts, workers were also asked to take images of a part of their body that they discussed in their writings.

Kahvehane Kongresspark (2016), a temporary café, ceramic cups/saucers and a site-specific performance in public space is concerned with the colonial history of coffee as a global trans-plant, exploring human entanglements with coffee.

This article describes how the technologies of illusion in a stereoscopic audiovisual apparatus are utilised to problematise the limits of perception, and how our relationship with the invisible and the non-human may be re-negotiated through technological devices. The work articulates a reflection about the “ways of knowing” as the political dimension in the native forest and its relationship with the Huilliche people. The article problematises the dominant western episteme that separates the human from the non-human, which in turn is an ideological need for justifying the increasing ecological devastation. Hence, the epistemological becomes a political problem by assuming that it determines not only the ways in which we understand the world but also  what defines our relationship with the environment.

This short essay-film brings together some of the most significant assets gathered during my five-year involvement with a fishing boat in Malta, its crew and the Abela family who run and own the boat. Using the boat as a key referent, I explore notions of time and continuity through a selective use of split screen and a rich multi-layered audio-editing process. Key to this process is the use of repetition, disruption and transversality as creative strategies that enhance public engagement and immersion. The film combines text, images and sounds from my fieldwork as well as images and films chosen from the Abela family archives. Keywords: Documentary, photography, ethnography, visual anthropology, observational cinema, fieldwork

In this brief essay, I chat about some of the anxieties of writing about monsoon airs. New Delhi, as my material interlocutor, provides me with a wealth of stories, ideas and observations. For this issue for Hyphen, I informally stitch together some hyphenated arguments and feelings associated with mucus, confrontation and depression, and their temporal affiliations in the articulation of an air of the monsoon. Observations arise out of my research fieldwork during the winter months of 2018 entangled with work from summer 2018, collaborating in the versioning and dreaming of a methodology.