Echo In Delirium

Have you ever felt like the past is here to stay? That the present is just an endless loop of everything that happened before, repeating over and over? Have you ever felt that there is no way to break out of that loop? Welcome to ECHO IN DELIRIUM.

In recent years, society has been rocked by crises: pandemics, wars in our neighbourhood, skyrocketing inflation. To cope with existential insecurity and depression, many people have turned to music, films and objects they loved as children. What seemed outdated or ironic not so long ago, either in decoration or in clothing style, could now become a symbol of serenity, a familiar anchor in an estranged world.

In my series, I explore items stuck here from the 1980s and 1990s. I was looking for people in their twenties who are not riding the latest fashion wave but who are obsessed with a particular style and material culture which was in vogue when they had not even been born.

I photographed people in their thirties who fondly remember their childhood, some of them still preserving their treasured possessions–including Barbie dolls, trolls, Nintendo relics and Polly Pocket figurines–locked up or in a display case. I visited a retro game fair, where pinball machines and arcade games were not items of utility but museum objects, or relics, which are taken out of their hiding places on exceptional occasions. I went to see the Schwarzenegger museum as well, which is not even a collection but a sanctuary raised for a living man. And I've photographed places and situations that seem to have spent the last few decades locked in amber. 

The point of the project is repetition, the idea that everything that surrounds us has already been experienced once, that what others treasure has already been our object of use, and that what once meant a lot is devoured by the institution of nostalgia and reproduced in its copy. Echo In Delirium deals mainly with the object culture and design of the eighties and nineties, when Hungary went from one ism to another. After socialism came capitalism, and from the second half of the twenties everything was put in brackets. Then, just like our fashion and our objects, our history was repeated.

The images of the Echo in Delirium series that have just been uploaded are only a part of the full series. It was published as a photobook by Symposion and Everybody Needs Art at the end of 2024.

Technology and installation:

The pictures were taken with compact and SLR analogue cameras from the nineties. The grain and texture of the film evokes the era, but at the same time elements of today are present in the images, not hiding when they were actually taken. 

Some of the images have been framed with unique colour frames. The inspiration came from the graphic elements of the period, when text was typically highlighted with similar framing to attract attention. 

Nostalgia often brings to mind the places of our childhood, our homes. That is why some of the works are reminiscent of objects from home, for example in the form of rugs, towels or curtains. The curtain features one of the important images of the series (Delirium): large eyes, glowing red from the flash. Behind the curtain is a sequence (0690), a vase of roses in a 90's mobile phone, withering away, but always a newer and newer one, the process repeating, causing confusion.

The title: 

Echo is the nymph of Greek mythology, cursed by Hera to repeat only the last words of others. I imagined this nymph driven to the brink of madness by her condition.