Bíborka Béres and Ádám Jeneses
presentation of work process
Hungarotrópus (Hungarotropic) is born out of a food meditation exercise Bíborka did with a piece of orange. The task was to observe closely the food with all the senses, and try and experience every small step of it being consumed and travelling in the upper part of the digestive system. She connected this experience with her grandmother’s anecdotes she heard as a young child about tropical fruits being incredibly rare and a luxury in the communist times in Hungary. Oranges, clementines and bananas were considered treasures, which at once could be used as invaluable currency to bribe or convince people (teachers, landlords, bosses or other superiors) and were also items of hedonism, the taste and eating of which represented a optimistic, dream-like life, somewhere far away from the then-current system. Dance and performance-making, for Bíborka, represents a similar kind of joy and hedonism. Going back to the very experience of consuming tropical fruits, Bíborka uses her grandmother’s stories about navigating her own personal interests and pursuing her desires in a system that is built on suppressing them.
Prior to the residency, Bíborka and Ádám will prepare the project to be ready for an intensive week-long research. They will make audio recordings of Bíborka’s grandmother’s stories about the fruits, and her desires and fantasies while living in the small town of Gyöngyös during socialism, reconstruct the elusive olfactoric, gustatory components of the period based on her recollections, gather potential dance prompts and exercises to go deeper into the experience of the human body with tropical fruits, research food supply chains and the social and economic aspects of tropical fruits being imported to countries far from where they grow, collect references of artists and projects revolving around the emotion enhancing and evocating aspects of olfaction, gustation and tactition.
We want to use the week-long residency at ANTISEZONA to bring together these different sources and materials in the studio, and research how they can come together. We will seek connections, contrasts and associations within the material, then choose the threads worth pursuing and develop new material from them in the form of dance and performance. By the end of the week of intense research, we hope to develop a clear frame for our project, and to present the materials found on ANTISEZONA. This is all to prepare for our performative exhibition Hungarotrópus, which will take place in a prefab flat (apartment in a classic socialist housing block) in Budapest, where the flat will be turned into a complete fantasy-land based on the materials we find, using scent and sound compositions, video and dance by Bíborka, live.
Hungarotrópus on ANTISEZONA is realised through DANCE HUB, a residency and studio slot programme that is a part of the European Life Long Burning project.