Krisztina Erdei with Dániel Misota
Taking Time
3-channel video, 2024
Krisztina Erdei and Dániel Misota’s work is the culmination of a long-term engagement with the community of Bátaapáti, a small village in Hungary’s Tolna County, whose outskirts have hosted a low- and medium-level radioactive waste final repository since 2011. Their project explores the complex social, economic, and cultural implications of living in proximity to this nuclear waste storage, blending community-based participation, artistic intervention, and personal storytelling. The artists' primary focus is on the villagers’ intimate, non-official narratives of their lives in the shadow of this looming nuclear facility. For over a year, Erdei and Misota frequently returned to Bátaapáti, building relationships with residents of all ages and backgrounds, collecting their personal stories that evoke different ways of living, working, and loving throughout the village’s turbulent history over the past two centuries. Through telling these stories, they juxtapose politically and economically significant "grand narratives" with personal memories, examining how the presence of the repository reshapes the community's collective memory, its space, and day-to-day experiences.
The central film of the 3-channel video installation portrays Bátaapáti through a series of short scenes with filmic re-enactments of the collected stories, co-created and performed by local community members. By reshuffling locations and protagonists, the artists engage the residents in a dynamic reflection on their shared history, contemplating the vast timescales framed by the radioactive waste stored nearby. This condensed account of the village's history is framed by the other two videos’ slow-moving, almost static scenes. In one of them, the camera explores the organic texture of the repository’s underground tunnel walls, contrasting them with the carefully crafted crates of radioactive waste. The other video lingers on the lonely church tower of Üveghuta in a forest near Bátaapáti, which is the sole remnant of a once thriving German-minority village there whose buildings have otherwise been entirely reclaimed by nature. The tower serves as a testament to historical changes that occur in time; the rapid economic decline following the collapse of the region’s viticulture, as well as the rural-to-urban out-migration that occurred in the early 20th century that was further compounded by the forced displacement of the village’s German population after World War II. The juxtaposition of these two environments—the radioactive waste repository and the abandoned settlement—invites us to consider how very human yet volatile personal concerns and desires are suspended between grand narratives of history and catapulted into the unfathomable more-than-human scale of deep time.
The work reflects on the interwoven layers of past, present, and future, and the broader tensions between human and non-human forces in the Anthropocene. It challenges the dominance of official, scientific documentation and historical narratives by prioritizing lived experience over archival material, creating a dialogue between the local cultural context and global issues such as ecology, radioactive decay, and human impact on the environment. Inspired by the rich social and cultural fabric of the region, the project raises critical questions about the relationship between material evidence, isolation, and memory. It serves as a powerful commentary on how anthropogenic markers, like the "nuclear cemetery" of the repository, extend the village’s temporal horizon into the unimaginable future, confronting us with the transience of human life against the backdrop of an enduring, radioactive legacy.
Special thanks: Réka Kuris, Attiláné Kuris, Jázmin Kuris, Dávid Durgonics, Balázs Zele, Kata Kocsor, Zsófia Margetin, Levente Farkas, Tamás Farkas , Artúr Forrai, Martin Braun, Mirtill Forrai, Attila Schafer, János Nagy, Mónika Illésné Nagy, Csaba Illés, János Horváth, Jánosné Horváth, Sándor Torac, József Utasi, József Sári, Józsefné Sári, Sándorné Oláh, Elizabet Víg, Izabell Víg, Anett Vígné Csereklei, Gábor Máté, Dorottya Tóth, Zsoltné Tóth, Gábor Tornóczky, Gáborné Tornóczky, András Zele, Andrásné Zele, Zoltán Ferenczi, Zoltán Kern, students from the primary school.
KRISZTINA ERDEI
Kristina Erdei is a visual artist born in Szeged, Hungary, currently living in Budapest. She graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in Philosophy, and received her PhD in Multimedia Art from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design with a dissertation entitled "Fighting for your story, memory research and contemporary art in the 21st century". His broader interests include visual culture, interdisciplinary and collaborative art practices. She is typically concerned with the cohesiveness and connectivity of communities, looking for the defining characters that shape and enable collective action. Erdei is currently a student at the Eötvös Loránd University Doctoral School of Philosophy, an assistant professor at the Partium Christian University and an art critic for the Magyar Narancs weekly liberal magazine with a strong satirical tone. Krisztina Erdei is a sensitive artist committed to working with communities. She is open to different mediums, but basically works in the field of photography and creates her series with a critical approach. Her aesthetics are unsought, instinctive, often her image seems to be created randomly, while in fact she builds complex connections in her works. In her multi-layered series, which actively involve the viewer in the process of drawing conclusions, her strong yet sympathetic opinion evokes the basic values of humanistic photography, reimagined in a 21st-century's context. http://krisztinaerdei.com/
DÁNIEL MISOTA (1992) is a filmmaker and media artist from Budapest whose work is concerned with the critical potential of film style. Upon graduating from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2022 he worked as cinematographer on various art, film and television projects across Europe resulting in notable collaborations with Joseph Tasnadi on his film ‘La Primavera’ and Talya Feldman on her multi-channel film installation ‘Psithurism’. His thesis film ‘Mária Kerényi, 41, July 1970’ — a reenactment of a propaganda film from the 1970s — has been presented in the exhibition ‘Re:Re: Artistic re-enactments, the art of re-enactment’ at MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art. He is currently working on his PhD on emancipatory cinematic forms.
https://www.instagram.com/daniel_probablement/
