Katalin Cseh-Varga (H/A)

Dear Gyuri,

When I started my first research in summer 2012 in Artpool, then on Liszt Ferenc Square, I clearly remember that this magical place compelled me to understand it, to explore its past, present and perhaps its future. Juli gave me a pile of reading material to help me prepare but of course I diligently started to do some searching online too. One of the videos, which I think Dóri called my attention to, was the one titled Galántai 70. I wouldn’t have thought that I can become part of a similar initiative now and can share what I got from you in the past nine years.

Your ideas on the active archive, your approach to basic research and on an open and inclusive institution – to mention but a few – were crucial for me at the time when I was looking for my ‘academic’ voice and position. Indeed, your work and your ideas have been such a source of inspiration for me since 2012 that I hardly published anything or held a lecture without relying on that conceptual universe that began some time with your criticism of the Art Academy quite early on and continues in 2020 with the Möbius strip, which you also used in Kapolcs. It is not reaching a peak or an end. IT CARRIES ON.

I want to thank you for all the talks we’ve had, for the torrents of information and complex ideas that I was the recipient of at times in interviews or when buried under documents in the research room. It is perhaps József Havasréti’s statement in the aforementioned Galántai 70 video that most aptly described this moment:

I’m sitting in Artpool, folders, sheets and photocopies around me, Dóri, Lajos or Marci working on the computer next to me, You enter the room and it kicks off an interaction; you tell us a story, a truth, or a theory, which is greater than itself (and myself) and I catch myself quietly nodding. After you left the research room, I often noted down these torrents of complex thoughts and I’m still carrying them with me – wherever I go.

May God, or rather Holonic Reality, grant you a long life,
Kati Cseh-Varga

● Artpool book presentation ● Humboldt-Universität Berlin - CV ●

● Artpool40 conference ● Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere ●