Title: Éva Szombat - ECHO IN DELIRIUMPublished by: Symposion, Budapest
Release Date: 2024
Contributors: SZOMBAT Éva
Genre: photobook
Pages: 140
ISBN13: 978-86-80284-11-8
17200 HUF
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 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 What seemed outdated or ironic not so long ago, either in decoration or in clothing style, could now become a symbol of serenity, a familiar anchor in an estranged world.
Passing away, the passing of time might be the most dreadful things in the world. At the same time, the cyclic nature of life, the reinterpretation of thing of the past, and the fact that nothing vanishes without a trace, might be some source of comfort.But maybe permanence is not a blessing, but a sign of things never changing: politics, fashion, pop culture staying the same, mining the same depths that ran dry decades ago. Maybe imagining a future is impossible, maybe we are just incapable of that. This series is a sign of things that already came, and came and came again.
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. - Éva Szombat
