Dorottya Szanka (she/her)
I play in the overlapping spaces of design, art, and community. I approach all my work as an exercise in storytelling, and researching things more significant than their physical or temporal bounds. Collaboration and collective making enrich the self and are centred in my work. Play is the heart of my practice – an endeavour toward seeing with a child’s eye, tracing lines and living inside them.
per-pages
per-pages* is a proposed interactive exhibition about play. You might be interested, asking for more details such as the opening times, location, or participants. I might say, do not look any further than this page.
This book consists of thoughts on nature, container, sequence, instrument and ground – the key pillars of this exploration. Following these pages, you will find loose leaves of instructions. The Prologue will guide you on how to handle them. The exhibition invites the participants to imagine its space, form, and activities in mind.
Tools are on the page, a stage.
*per- is a word-forming element meaning ‘throughout; thoroughly; entirely, utterly’.
a-drift-a-shore
There’s a stage where the seed grows, a stage where it takes shape, and a stage where it opens.
A migrating archive consisting of drifting seeds and their stories. Migration is defined as ‘movement from one country, place or locality to another.’ Seeds migrate and populate. They protect the planet and encode memories for life. Each movement has a story – whether human migration or the seed’s drifting mechanism from one coast to another.
In 2022, I began facilitating workshops for people who have experienced migration. The project investigated ways of storytelling through the metaphor of a sea bean, striving to nourish a fluid and safe environment for opening, sharing and drifting.
My research expounds on diasporic narratives and uncovers their many shapes, faces, and colours. Our story began before we were born: subsequent generations understand the trauma their ancestors underwent through the stories we inherit. How can we locate and channel our embedded, embodied experiences?
The seeds stay with me for a while, then drift to a new shore. To keep the movement continuous, I send a seed to anyone who would like to adopt a package with the story that belongs to it. Please send me a letter to dorottya.szanka@gmail.com
Project Links
future fossils
‘data never dies–content lives as quickly as it dies’
We live in an era of mass production, specifically of data. It is the data we are unknowingly consuming in excessive amounts and speed. Social platforms use time limitations to increase our urge to stay updated more frequently than ever. Every story and image shared becomes a fossil* after the 24-hour time frame. Data is always on the move, ephemeral, like a screensaver, a hypnotic dance – where the observer loses their sense of time.
What do ornaments of the future look like? The ornament makes something look more attractive but usually has no practical purpose. We now think about the creation of rhythm, using manufactured forms but suggesting future ornaments – the fossils of human inventions.
*fossil: a remnant, impression, or trace of an organism of past geologic ages that has been preserved in the earth’s crust.
