DemoLabrador
Karinthy Frigyes Secondary School
Budapest
This year the students investigate our era’s communities and work to lay the framework of a society-to-come, with which they situate last year’s research topic, anthropocene, in a broader context.
They examine and research family, gender roles, had organised a dictator-themed sleep-over, had a debate about religion and the importance of faith has well as addressed what different generations think about each other. Connected to this, they looked into a very influential community type of their generation, internet societies. The project’s aim is a labyrinth where each community is present in the form of an installation. They plan to realise a publication of the artwork’s descriptions and documentation of research.
Their research and artwork aims to find forms of behaviour and community strategies in the present to avoid tragic, dystopian screenplays of our planet coming true in our lifetime.
The students debuted with their first product called ’AlTerre’ at DemoLab 2018 summer camp at Hollókő. The 40-page publication is built on how we exploit our future in the present. In the first article the well-known Dutch artists Maja and Reuben Fowkes, specialists of Antrophocene, pose interesting questions, while the students present opportunities for civil and personal involvement.
WORKSHOP LEADERS
Emese Váradi
Teacher of visual culture and culture of the built environment
Emese is currently a teacher at the Karinthy Frigyes Bilingual Secondary School. She explores the frontiers of visual education in her daily pedagogical work. She developed the complex visual education program Képzeletműhely (Imagination Workshop) for primary school children, realised in the framework of an EU project with the cooperation of her colleagues in several schools of the South-Budapest region. Her long-term goal is to encourage teenagers’ interest in contemporary art and nourish their creative aspirations. One outcome of this was the foundation of a group comprised of students and artists, which has been creating works in line with the themes proposed by the school’s international projects for four years now. In 2016/17, following the self-organised, democratic pedagogical principles of Freinet, Emese was mentor of the Tanközlöny and PlayUtopia projects, in which she worked closely with student groups, analysing the educational and social apparatuses and summarising their conclusions and experiences in the form of a publication.
Dominika Trapp
artist
Dominika studied in László Révész’s class at the Painting Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, graduating in 2012. In 2011, she and Márton Dés founded the Csakoda artist group, with the mission of organising exhibitions in cultural centres throughout Hungary. They won tranzit.hu and Erste Bank’s Catalyst Award in 2016. In 2017, she founded the conceptual band Peasants in Atmosphere, consisting of folk and experimental musicians, with a debut performance at the OFF-Biennale. Dominika has exhibited her personal projects in several Hungarian towns, at the OFF-Biennale and, on many different occasions, in Berlin, London, Brno and Miami. She is a member of the Studio of Young Artists and received the Herczeg Klára prize in 2015 and the Derkovits scholarship in 2016 and 2017. In the last few years, her work has dealt with the relationship between the individual and global/local trends, as well as the artist’s competence within the same context. In her curatorial work, she aims to create opportunities for dialogue between groups of people separated for geographical, cultural, political, etc. reasons.