Truth is Stranger than Fiction

'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' explores the notions of truth, lies and propaganda during the cold war.

I have worked with two different archival holdings from the Blinken Open Society Archives (Budapest, Hungary) for this project. The first archival collection is a series of 'field reports' from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Research Institute. These are reports collected through interviews with people from or who had access to communist Hungary during the 1950s. The second archival collection consists of amateur photographs from the 1980s. These photographs were discarded by the Hungarian state photographic development company, Főfotó, for technical or political reasons.

The research phase of this project was supported through a Visegrad scholarship. I examined 10.000 photographs from the Private Photo and Film Foundation (HU OSA 320) and 3500 ‘field reports’ from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute ( OSA - HU OSA 300-1-2-1).

Truth is Stranger than Fiction also exists in the format of the artist's book. The book has a circular structure and offers a non-linear narrative. Two key features characterise the book: "surrealist" texts depict the harshness of daily life when Hungarian communism was at sunrise, while colour photographs are a prelude to its sunset.

Through arrhythmia, I seek to break the reading cadence to question the illustrative function that we assign to the photograph and highlight the ambiguity of the fictitious relationship between images and texts.

The book was shortlisted for the VI Fiebre Dummy Award (Madrid, Spain) in 2021. Moreover, it was selected among 50 other Belgian books to be showcased at the 2022 Rencontres d'Arles: https://vimeo.com/718268886

'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' was part of the group show 'Talent Latent' at the 2022 SCAN Tarragona Festival.

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During the Landskrona residency, I would like to develop a project - 'A country where swans have their bank account'. The project title comes from a homonymous article published in a Belgian newspaper 'Le Vingtième Siècle' that reports a story about a Swedish fundraising campaign for swans stranded in the cold near Landskrona in January 1928.

I am eager to incorporate into my photographic investigation of Landskrona various support elements (testimonies, interviews, literary work, historical accounts and newspaper articles) to tell stories of the city and catalyse its multiple truths. I am interested in fiction and nonfiction storytelling. I want to bring a new dimension to the territory of Landskrona and focus on less-known stories of resilience. For this reason, I intend to reinterpret the themes of community, connection, migration and memory through photography and writing.