Crumple Zone, 2026

Title: Crumple Zone / Ütközőzóna

AI-based image generation, digital collage, glitch video, sound – 1920 × 1080 px, duration: 2’00”

The video deconstructs the iconography of national identities in the Central and Eastern European region, reconfiguring them within the spaces of contemporary everyday life, post-industrial labor environments, and consumer infrastructures. Archaic, national, and historical costumes appear in profane settings: shopping malls, metro cars, bus stops, office interiors, roadworks, and parliamentary spaces. The figures do not emerge as heroes but as functional bodies – waiting, working, consuming, operating. National symbols thus lose their elevated, mythic status and become scenographic elements of present-day socio-economic conditions.

The work deliberately employs anachronism and aesthetic over-identification as its primary strategies. Commuting Scythian kings, office workers dressed in ceremonial Hungarian attire, Matyó-clad beggar women, or Kádár-era laborers in contemporary battery factories do not function as historical reconstructions but as distorted icons. These visual short circuits expose how national identity is reduced to a simplified, reusable image and instrumentalized as a tool of political communication. The glitch aesthetic and the noise-based electronic soundscape operate not merely as stylistic devices but as metaphors for narrative instability – signaling the fragmentation of meaning, the overload of identity, and the erosion of collective memory.

Rather than proposing an alternative national myth, the video interrogates the very mechanisms through which myths operate. By collapsing historical mise-en-scène and contemporary power structures into a single visual field, the work reveals the tension inherent in the region’s condition as a “collision zone”: a space shaped by hybrid identities, interrupted narratives, and individualized survival strategies concealed beneath the rhetoric of collective belonging. The central question of the work is not what national identity is, but what it becomes when it loses its historical and ethical complexity and is transformed into a purely visual and political commodity.

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