Anima Mundi

World soul. A force permeating matter, giving shape and function to its parts and its entirety. The assumption of an organizing principle.

In his latest project, Máté Bartha takes on the role of a fictive observer, to create a universe of images, attempting to present the hidden anatomy of the metropolis as a metaphysical mirror of human existence. Urban space is a social product, a "second nature" created by people, as the philosopher Henri Lefebvre called it. But at the same time, an organism no longer governed by its creators, but becoming the governing force itself. It cannot be understood any longer via anthropocentric thought structures, but through the post-human grammar of the city itself. 

Anima Mundi is a poetic take on the desperate act of trying to find structure and meaning in the phenomena around us, in this case, looking at the metropolis as the entirety of creation. The project draws its inspiration from attempts that, balancing between science and magic, tried to define entirety: the enigmatic Voynich manuscript, Robert Fludd's holistic approach, or their contemporary paraphrase, Codex Seraphinianus. 

Patterns and different grid structures emerge on and in between the images, standing as an allegory for mankind’s endeavors to create order out of chaos, and to make sense of the arbitrariness that surrounds us – something we ourselves have created.

The project has been developed together with Emese Mucsi, curator of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center.