As borders between cultures and places shift at accelerating speeds, the desire to return to some origin becomes evident across western contexts. The politics of place is further complicated by the cultural homogenization of global capitalism. It is this perceived loss and resulting search for origin that leads to the reemergence of an authoritarian brand of nationalism. Mourning what has passed and yearning for its return seem to be ubiquitous aspects of change; where the past is often an idealized version of ‘official’ histories mixed with wishful projections towards an imaginary future.

My recent work addresses the relationship between the present, the past and ultimately the future in terms of shifting cultural and physical borders. I explore nationalism in the context of Hungary with a focus on late 19th-century folk traditions as an entry point (1880-1920). In terms of its borders, 1920 marks a traumatic event in Hungarian history where the country lost 70% of its territory. My base materials comprise of antique ‘folk weavings’ from this period and the artifacts are appropriated and reframed to highlight the concept of loss, while also complicating our notions regarding the production of national identities. I focus on folk traditions precisely because they seem to defy national borders by existing both inside and outside of them. The gesture of appropriating textiles from inside as well as outside of current national borders embodies the concept of loss, but my reframing of these artifacts also highlights the porousness of culture and the adaptability and resiliency of folk traditions which cannot be contained by the nation-state.

Against the idea of origin and the purification of the nation, Birdsong (Red) combines a Hungarian weaving from outside the current national borders with a traditional embroidery motif that originates from a region of contemporary south-central Hungary. The web address to the image of each artifact/element as found on the internet is embroidered onto each ‘painting’ to suggest that all origins are now located in the globalized marketplace; a none-place where everything is endlessly decontextualized and flattened into an image of itself. All appropriated patterns are hand-embroidered while the text is done by machine, including taglines from the original Etsy or eBay listings. I often discard the original color of each appropriated folk pattern and allow my version of the pattern to assume the color of its new context, echoing the base color of the weaving or the color of the design present in the appropriated artifact.

In the Birdsong series, one of the web addresses is a YouTube link to a folk song about a bird. The song is in Hungarian but belongs to the Csángó people from the Moldova region of current Romania. This region has never been part of Hungary across its 1000-year history but contains an ‘authentic’ population of Hungarians who, according to some contemporary ethnographers, hold intact some of the oldest and most authentic traditions of Hungarian folk culture. What does it mean for a nation to locate part of its core outside of itself?