What is the price of social advancement? What do we have to give up, what must we change, or what parts of ourselves must we push into the background in order to move forward, fit in, or become accepted?
The panel discussion takes place as an accompanying program of the Border Situations exhibition and explores the personal, social and cultural consequences of the promise of upward mobility. The conversation examines who has access to this possibility, what expectations one must conform to in order to achieve it, and what visible or hidden losses it entails.
Through past and present experiences of Budapest and Hungary, the discussion approaches how all this is connected to the broader order of coloniality. How are the desire to align with the West, a peripheral self-image, self-subordinating reflexes and everyday practices of social exclusion intertwined? What does this mean in a context where progress often becomes imaginable only through adaptation to the expectations of others?
Panel participants: Anna Fabricius, Emőke Both, Zoltán Ginelli, Barna Petrányi (moderator)
🔵 Anna Fabricius, one of the exhibiting artists, joins the conversation through her project Home is Where Work is. Her work sensitively highlights the work-related, emotional and livelihood sacrifices that mobility entails, especially when the relationship between home, work and self-determination is fundamentally transformed.
🔵 Emőke Both, president of Bagázs, opens up the topic from the perspective of social inequalities in Hungary, the everyday forms of exclusion and institutional approaches. Her perspective brings us closer to understanding why the possibility of social advancement is not equally available to everyone, and what conditions, expectations and relations shape the opportunity to move forward.
🔵 Zoltán Ginelli, geographer and global historian at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, joins the conversation from the perspective of the legacy of colonialism and its still-present, often overlooked consequences. In his academic work, he examines how Hungary has been connected to the broader history of colonialism, and how the meaning of this connection has changed in recent years with the country’s new forms of international embeddedness.
🔵 The discussion will be moderated by Barna Petrányi, managing director of the non-profit organization Pro Progressione, who has worked for many years on cultural and social projects that bring together different social issues, communities and perspectives.
Rather than relying on generalized tropes surrounding mobility and colonization, the discussion invites us to think in a more nuanced way about the historical legacies and present-day power relations that shape who can move forward in society, how, and at what cost. At the same time, it also seeks a language for speaking about these questions within the space of a Budapest exhibition, in a way that allows global hierarchies and local experiences to illuminate one another.
Border Situations is the Budapest exhibition of the LEAP – LEgAcy in Progress: (Re)Constructing European Narratives and (De)colonising Discourses project.
The exhibition is co-funded by the European Union’s CERV program.