From: imaginarymuseum.org
Subject: Re: Galántai 80 - REMINDER
Date: 20 April 2021 at 02:54:12
To: Artpool Galantai Tribute

Wrong idea to speak about dead lines

I think I first met the Galántais in 1988

Now we are 33 years later

I first met some Hungarian unwanted state subjects in 1976

My first political interest in politics was in 1956, I was a boy of 12

I was following the Cold War news on the Risings in Hungary on the radio, and pictures in the weekly illustrated

So I started wondering what became of that country later

Was it 1959 that I first saw the Iron Curtain with my own eyes?

Went to a summer camp near Graz, we were cutting trees next to the Hungarian border and there were watch towers on the Hungarian side

It was as I said in1976 that I crossed that border cold as it still was. I came by bicycle and took a road from Vienna to Győr

The border guards were stunned but let me pass and so I drove at dusk into Győr and I had read about what happened there in 1956

The book was by Andy Anderson published by a libertarian socialist group from the UK which we had started to translate into Dutch and I had started to do deep documentation on the 56 rising. I still have the manuscript and reproduction of photographs

It was one of my maiden researches in 1972 at the International Insitute of Social History ... many years later I have been a curator there for modern social movements

Some of the oppositional materals of the eighties are to be seen there now... including a silkscreen printing press of Magyar samizdat

So you send me an email with the word ‘dead line’ but I am not yet dead

What’s the hurry?

I have something in mind

But it is a life line connecting me with that thing called Hungary

Also it was in 1988 that I first learned the name of Soros

The Galantais had asked me to write a letter of support to a certain mr Soros in New York which I did from my academic institution describing that I found the documentation work by Artpool of a good quality

I have witnessed the later activities of sport for the “independent” which than became dependent

Nevertheless it is hard to act outside any realm of interest and the purity of the dissident days in Hungary are long gone and I had to swallow some bad tasting developments of the artistic opposition which I did get to know at the end of the eighties

The Iconnu group were top players in this tragedy

I had been at half underground meetings and salons of people under Kadar house arrest

So so many memories I type here on my phone with one finger

Because I hate the word dead line

I may make something in due time. So many things to do, stay young if 77

I will send this without correcting, decipher it as you like

You can send me a personal life line some day

Find a less bureaucratic and more open approach

The Artpool idea should be kept alive

Without Dead Lines

Tjebbe

Tjebbe van Tijen / Imaginary Museum Projects