An exhibition by Anna Lénárd and Földes & Co. Architects Ltd.

For the average city dweller, flats are not built with bricks but with monthly mortgage payments. Money – a thing that is never present in large enough quantities – often manifests in life as the only material suitable for building and creating.

In the Cellar Workshop of the Vajda Lajos Studio we have constructed the half-finished walls of a newly built 38 square metre flat from the neighbourhood of Blaha, whose architects, while outlining each of the 198 flats, didn't spend much time designing personalised details.

The installation consists of 3 tons of shredded invalid or damaged bank notes. These "money bricks" are now regarded as easily accessible refuse. Their valuable original substance, however, could reach only a small number of people, similarly to the wood whose sawdust is gathered in the furniture factory to make plywood for kitchen counters. The other half of the installation consists of the exhibition space itself – a sizable wine cellar from the Turkish period, built with brick and quarry stone, and located under the former home of well-to-do Serbian merchants.

In the doubled space, two time periods are superimposed on each other: the two spaces were once inhabited by groups of different social and economic standing. Their details signified two different qualities of life. How the installation, which has been constructed in such a happening-like fashion, and the four hundred-year old architecture – with their strikingly different building materials and systems of proportion and structure – reflect on one another will only become apparent at the exhibition site.

Vajda Lajos Studio, Cellar Workshop, Szentendre, 11-26 July 2009

Opening speech: Endre Koronczi

(Anna Lénárd's original page:Részlet kérdése)

¹Untranslatable play on words: in Hungarian the same word (részlet) is used for "detail" and "mortgage".