Andi Galdi Vinko

Para is Hungarian slang for expressing a subtle fear or awkwardness, Disco represents fun and play. Put together the title alludes to an elusive paradise. A photographic pursuit trying to capture or restage the strange surreality of the everyday. Observing the disaffected youth’s, my generation’s illness of an overexposed yet neglected exhibitionism: the efforts of trying to stand out from the crowd in a rapidly disposable world. In this struggle to reach paradise there is a weird duality: the aim to reach a seemingly easy, colorful happiness results in an uncanny, melancholic loneliness.

For a very long time motherhood was considered somewhat taboo in the art world. As long as I can remember, female role models I admired openly talked about their choice of career over family. Some might have had children but never talked about their insecurities or sacrifices. Artist and talent awards age limits usually are 35 or younger. But as soon as a woman turns 30 she is often viewed as old and her biological clock ’is ticking’. The years to make the choice between having children or being successful are short and coincide with the years when one or the other might happen but none are guaranteed.

When I realised I was pregnant, I had no idea what awaited me. How messy and how raw, how unpredictable and how out of control motherhood really was compared to the images I had in my mind from films, photos, paintings done by men. Then I was an emerging artist, traveling around and going to art fairs and exhibition openings. Now I am a mother of two working on borrowed time hoping the years I’ve lost mothering can be written into my CV without guilt or shame.

This work in progress, which will always be a work in progress, is about becoming, understanding, and remembering. Trying not to forget all those things that once seemed so important, and the minute you think you know it another challenge appears.

How can something so universal as motherhood be so lonely? How come we all have to experience it and there are no answers to all those struggles? What about our bodies, our hormones, our thoughts, our friends, our loves? Our careers, our homes, our dishes, our laundry, our sexual desires? What happened to our freedom, our showers, our sleeping hours?
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I love being a mother. I also loved being an artist.

This series presents the inexplicable peculiarity that Hungary, my homeland, means for me. In recent years, I have spent a lot of time abroad, longing for someplace else, like many of my eastern European contemporaries, believing that my place and happiness lie somewhere out there.

While there are still a lot of things I don’t like about Hungary, something has changed. I have started to look at my environment with a forgiving, strange kind of love. I have stopped having expectations or wanting to change anything, and I have begun just observing my home, almost like a tourist.

A whole new enchanted world has opened up to me. Everyday life is now permeated by a sense of nostalgia. It is as if time had stopped between a dream never to be reached and the remembrances of a past I myself had never experienced. Everything has gravity and significance, while in the meantime it’s all just the same and nothing really matters.

Homesick and Homeland are both weird feelings for my generation that lives nowhere and everywhere.