XENO

TOPIA
VOLUME 1.

Radical Openness
C h r o n o c o m m o n s
Easternfuturism
Manifesto Reflux
Psychogeography
G r e a t F l o o d
A n a c h r o n y
N e c r o p o l i t i c s
S p e c t e r s Cataclysm
XENO
TOPIA
by Zsolt Miklósvölgyi & Márió Z. Nemes

Volume 1.

3
 XENO TOPIA

Table of Contents Pages Suzanne Treister:

Hexen 2.0 24–25
Zsolt Miklósvölgyi & Márió Z. Nemes:
Xenotopia or a Space of Radical Openness (Editorial Foreword) 4 Márk Horváth & Ádám Lovász:
The Spectrality of National Identity and 26–30
Mahan Moalemi: the Anachronistic Necropolitics of Hungarofuturism 
Notes on The Hungarofuturist Manifesto 5–10
László Gy ő rffy:
Jake Tobin & Dominika Trapp: Cataclysm with Laughing Gas 31–33
Who Can Blame Them?  11
Zoltán Komor:
Mia Imani Harrison: The Swine Wizard 34–35
FUBU Futurism. Manifesto 12–13
Chazár Keresztély:
Ulrike Gerhardt: No Bullshit 36
Memories of Easternfuturism 14–16
Mátyás Sirokai:
Tamás Komoróczky: To the Phantasmians 37
Pannonian Betyár 17
Zsigmond Kompolthy:
LAND 3C: Neck Deep in Shit. János Vajda’s Sausage Dream 38–39
URN 18–19
Mátyás Dunajcsik: 
Daniel Hüttler: The Last Hussar. Requiem for 40–41
Manifesto_Reflux_1_Psychogeography 20–22 the Austro-Hungarian Space Programme 2367 A. D.
Márió Z. Nemes: Márió Z. Nemes:
Thanatopolitical Theses 23 Hungarofuturist Production of Hauntology 42–55
 Xenotopia or a Space of Radical Openness (Editorial Foreword)
by Zsolt Miklósvölgyi & Márió Z. Nemes
The notion of xenotopia, which also serves
as the title of our new magazine project, is
based on the concept of the Alien Elsewhere,
or the metamorphosing spatial alterity,
which enables the hungarofuturization of
the “homeland.” xenotopia is not a place,
but a non-place where the post-Hungarian
virus is being produced. The old homeland
was a quarantine, which, according to the
laws of territoriality, wanted to settle the
Hungarians in a claustrophobic interiority.
But we are all interstellar nomads who
are constantly transgressing the binary
logic of interiority and exteriority. The
xenotopia magazine aims to suspend the
false quarantine logic of nationalisms by
providing space for hyperviral nomadology
of ideas, metaphors, and aesthetics from a
nanoscopic up to a cosmic scale.  bridge “between two seemingly separate
As the Hungarofuturist Manifesto (2017)
has already declared: “We demand a Hun-
garian Outer Space instead of a Conservative
Sky! This is not escapism; instead, it is a
new Hungarian land-taking that does not so
much suspend the previous one but rather
rewrites it, incorporating other narratives.
Hungarian Outer Space in this context is
not another place; instead, it represents
a geophilosophical concept, a desire for
another place.” The declaration of the
post-Hungarian program has demanded
xenopolitics and xenoaesthetics, which,
from now on, should also be supplemented
with the demand for xenotopia.  In doing so, she embraces different East-
The first edition of the xenotopia
magazine, which has been commissioned
by the off-Biennale Budapest 2020, can
be interpreted as an attempt to situate the
Hungarofuturist project within an array of
other emergent ethnofuturist tendencies.
Accordingly, the pages of the first xenoto-
pia issue function both as a sensual, as well
as a discursive space for (para)academic
analysis and artistic interpretations of
Hungarofuturism in various ethnofuturist
contexts. This endeavor aligns with the
concept of Mahan Moalemi’s “relational
futurism (or, as a matter of disciplinarity,
Comparative Futurism)” he suggests within
his essay Notes on the Hungarofuturist
Manifesto that he wrote for this issue. At
the end of his dazzling analysis, Moalemi
urges for a certain kind of comparative
sensitivity or a compassionate “recourse
to relational immanence, one which allows
each ethnofuturism to remain responsive
(as in both absorbing and reflecting) the
radiation of another ethnofuturism.” This
type of “relational futurism” is perfectly
reflected in the experimental text of Mia
Imani Harrison, a Pacific Northwest afro-
futurist artist, activist, and writer, whose
writing aims to envision an imaginary
worlds: African-Americans and Eastern
Europeans” by unfolding an untold al-
ternative history of the Afro-American
clothing brand fubu that “transcended
the limits and restrictions that are placed
on not only the Black imagination but
also the visual articulation of Blackness
by becoming an international success.”  would suppose new forms of life beyond
Following these lineages of thoughts,
Ulrike Gerhardt’s essay Memories of
Easternfuturism sets out a geopolitically
nuanced cultural topography by mapping
out various counter-futurist narratives of
post-socialist Eastern-European art scenes.
ernfuturist movements and weaves them
together into a detailed tapestry that allows
us to understand the cohesive patterns of
seemingly divergent artistic strategies
beyond the hegemonic, Western-centric
narratives of possible futurities. Gerhardt’s
attempts are also resonating in the project
of land 3c, a fictional entity constituted
by the hypothetical union of the landmass
between the Baltic, Black, and the Adri-
atic seas. In this fictional scenario of the
collective that has been established by
artists of Bulgarian, Lithuanian and Czech
origin, the world has undergone a process
of hyper-homogenization where land 3c
emerged as an alternative geopolitical
strategy to preserve that which was believed
to represent the cultural singularity of the
region it constitutes.
Water, as a material-discursive hyperob-
ject, also plays a significant role in Daniel
Hüttler’s, as well as in Tamás Komoróczky’s
contributions to the first edition of xenoto-
pia, since both of them depict a geofictional
scenario where the Carpathian Basin is
being flooded by the irresistible forces of
water. This xenoaesthetic transformation
of the imaginary landscape of Hungarian
7
nationalist narratives would conclude to
a necropolitical concept that, however,
would not result in a nihilistic concept of
termination. Instead, as both the manifesto
text Thanatopolitical Theses of Márió Z.
Nemes, as well the essay of Márk Horváth
and Ádám Lovász entitled The Spectrality
of National Identity and the Anachronistic
Necropolitics of Hungarofuturism suggest,
the biopolitical regimes of vitality. In that
sense, the very notion of xenotopia, and
thus the first edition of the xenotopia
magazine, calls for a radical openness
towards coercive forces that are constantly
exceeding and transgressing our attempts
to control them. As the Iranian philoso-
pher, Reza Negarestani argues, precisely
in the context of epidemics, one must be
radically open towards the unpredictable,
open to be opened, uncovered, gutted, or
demarcated.
xenotopia is an imaginary place for
such radical opennes, that transcends both
the limitations of the phony “openness”
of liberalist economic approaches, as well
as the self-consuming quarantine logic of
nationalist thinking.
notes on the
by Mahan Moalemi
hungarofuturist
manifesto
“[T]he Outside is always an opening on to
a future: nothing ends since nothing has
begun, but everything is transformed...”
– Gilles Deleuze, Foucault
– part i –
Dobogókő is the highest peak of the Visegrád Mountains in northern Hungary. It is a major vacation spot,
with many cottages and village houses turned into hotels and resorts. The guests can also enjoy a visit to a
permanent exhibition, The Beginning of the Hungarian Tourism, at a nearby museum which is named after
the physicist Lóránd Eötvös – it might have as well been in this area that he conducted some of his famous
experiments in gravitational acceleration measurement around the turn of the twentieth century. But, over
the years, others have also gravitated to these hills and the neighboring Pilis Mountains, overlooking the
Danube Bend. The neopagans of the nation, in particular, often make a pilgrimage to the site, as they have
since the early 1990s because they believe it is home to the Heart Chakra of the Earth. An aerial view,
after all, shows how the river bends and twists to draw an almost heart-shaped outline around the hills.
 The Hungarofuturist Manifesto, a mythopoetic communiqué written and published independently,
both in print and online, by Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z. Nemes in 2018, is accompanied by such an
image, among others: a heart-shaped, hand-cut piece of the map of Hungary with Dobogókő in its center,
seemingly rising from the palm of a figure that looks as pure and primal as a humanist ideal. All of the
images are of paper collages made by the authors (in collaboration with Peter Lowas) and photocopied
in black and white on pastel-colored backgrounds, in the usual range that inkjet papers come in. There
is, indeed, an unassuming avant-garde charm to these prints, one which might be as much an ode to the
age of modernist manifestos as it is a reminder that such aesthetics has already been rediscovered and
reinvigorated once before and forever popularized post-Xerox.
  Each photocopied collage slowly reveals that the demystified status of the medium’s once charming
originality is insistently addressed from a Hungarian standpoint and placed within the context of one such
Hungarianness, which in return seems to serve as the gravitational force that holds the pieces together, hand in
hand with the affordances of highly accessible user technologies. Such reorientation transcends the art historical
endeavor of uncovering the Hungarian share in an international avant-garde and corresponds to the Manifesto’s
 pursuit of “the creative rechanneling of nar-
ratives of origin and a restoration of hope
in futures past.” It is to put cultural legacies
in light of a genesis other than the one they
Notes on the Hungarofuturist Manifesto
were hitherto associated with, whether in
time or space, evoking an alternate course
of history that might potentially lead to
an alternate destiny. (Curiously enough,
physicist and Tungsram researcher Pál
Selényi, who also edited the celebrated
German volume of landmark articles by
Eötvös in 1953, is dubbed “the father of
xerography.”)
Although the flattened collages might
serve as a background for the verbal content
of the Manifesto, which itself operates by
a certain logic of juxtaposition and rear-
rangement, they also display an amalgam
of the text’s references and some sort of
activation of its arguments. If unpacked,
deciphered, and retraced, each collage
can potentially function like a secret back
entry to the Manifesto, maybe a means
to reverse-engineer the Hungarofuturist
rationale – which is “to condition cultural
memory” – in an aesthetico-semantic
capacity. Dotting the words and images
of the Manifesto, reworked collocations,
paratactical exercises, and their subsequent
conceptual serendipities respond, one would
quickly realize, to the requirements of a
line of inquiry that involves matters of
race, ethnicity, national history, and collective memory, pivoting
on the axis of a proposed “post-Hungarianness.” It seems fair to
say that this investigation proceeds by repurposing the plane of
juxtaposition, conducted both visually and verbally, as a differ-
ential field of signifiers that is shared, and carries the tensions
rising, between notions like the native and the alien, the past
and the future, or the individual and the collective. With Hun-
garianness set to mutate into a composite concept, an exquisite
corpse, the aim seems to be a political and cultural reevaluation
of how epistemic correlations between belonging and presence
(or, similarly, alienation and absence) are often understood and
enacted in the above fields of inquiry.
Repurposefulness finds other resonances too. For example,
one of the collages features a reproduction of Gyula Derkovits’s
Dózsa on the Fiery Throne (1928), a work from a series of expres-
sionist woodcuts (not, for example, oil paintings, of course) that
commemorate the peasants’ revolts of 1514. The Transylvanian
knight György Dózsa led the uprising and, along with his band of
outsiders (the hajdúk), was brutally crushed by the landed nobility
of the Kingdom of Hungary in an act that would in retrospect
pass as a key instance of primitive accumulation and, accordingly,
part of a continental counter-revolution. Initially designated to
direct a crusade against the Ottomans, Dózsa ended up leading a
short-lived, anti-aristocratic revolution, and although chronically
defeated, his name has served as a reminder of how the means
of power can be turned, indeed repurposed, against the powerful.
In another image, against a wavering and gridded background,
sits the spread image of the album cover for Gammapolis (1979)
by Omega, the multi-million record selling space rock band from
Soviet Budapest. The cover illustration by István Nyári shows a
rugged and shriveled landscape, fairly mountainous with broad
valleys, that is being approached by a hawkish spacecraft, shooting
light beams that bounce off, unwaveringly, a craggy piece of land
here or the shiny surface of well rounded and sharply orthog-
onal shapes there: Horizontal skyrises of colossal proportions
are breaking the ground and emerging from the bottom of the
valley, extending block by block ad infinitum as in an inception
effect. No wonder that the lyrics of the album’s opening track,
eponymously titled as the compilation, speak of a maximum
jailbreak, a long-overdue escape from terrestrial provincialism
to a gammapolis that can be seen “up in the midnight sky, far
above,” and only with “heavenly eyes.”
Looming from beneath this picture plane and the clashing di-
mensions it holds within is the image of a sparkling globe, meshed
with a complex network of nodal triangulations that serves as a
fairly hackneyed yet widely recognizable visual allegory of the age
of globalization, not least the internet. On the top, a falcon spreads
its wings, and five words arc above the globe: “Minden Magyar
Felelős Minden Magyarért.” Every Hungarian is responsible for
every Hungarian. It is an oft-quoted statement by Dezső Szabó, a
novelist, public provocateur, and polemicist who rose to popularity
in the interwar period. Remembered by his rhetorical fury and ven-
omous prose, as well as his ideological incongruities, he distanced
9
himself from traditional values while remaining a skeptic of modernity at large, which he particularly witnessed
in unprecedented processes of proletarianization. His branch of nationalism, driven by a demagogic zeal and a
thick air of literary prowess, was manifest in how he addressed his personal life story, cloaked in a cast of myth,
as an embodiment of the history and destiny of the Hungarian people. So his venerated ability to narrate his own
instincts in continuum with the nation’s conduct often fell short of cultivating a congregation of popular demands
and desires, instead verging on disproportionate self-laudation. However, Szabó’s blend of agrarian socialism,
temporary anti-semitism, and crypto-Magyar-puritanism registers an age with too many contrasting ideological
and spiritual foundations, or none at all. His legacy speaks of a sincere but troubled attempt to make some sort
of sense of a world whose mystic edges were still sticking out of the waves of positivism sweeping over it.
There is another element in the same picture that proves key to the Hungarofuturist sentiment: Collaged
on top of a mountain at the center of the original illustration, sits the good old Eye of Providence atop an
unfinished pyramid, with its peak touching a node in the background network of worldwide connections. This
overfamiliar signifier invokes a notorious atmosphere in which age-old faux mythologies circulate and operate
through contemporary technologies of connectivity and, indeed, culminate in cyclonic hypes of conspiracist
ideation. However, the prospect of hidden associations, as seen by the Eye, gives rise to uncanny landscapes,
overlaying given associations with other wordly ones; the Eye, in its transnational and transhistorical outreach,
sees no less than a differential field of signifiers.
So one might wonder whether this landscape, a metonymy of the Earth, in fact depicts, for example, a
desiccated Carpathian Basin, a home to Magyars since the tenth century; or maybe a shriveled Huairou, the
mountainous district in northern Beijing and home to the Great Wall (particularly for the long and scribbly
yet parallel-looking lines that follow the topography up and down its curves in the lower and left side of the
picture, more visible in the original); or even Visočica, a mountain range in central Bosnia and Herzegovina,
known for a distinctly shaped hill of the same name that has repeatedly appeared as the main figure in the
Bosnian Pyramid Complex, a long-running and grossly funded pseudo-archeology-cum-tourism initiative based
on the scientifically disputed claim that this hill is one of five colossal prehistoric structures in the shape of a
pyramid constructed by Illyrians, equipped with an extensive tunnel network, a standing-wave observatory,
portals for intergalactic communication, and so forth (Additionally, a view from Crveni Kuk in Visočica,
as one would find on Wikimedia Commons, shows a twisting path not dissimilar to the one in the picture.)
– part ii –
The blend of politics, myth, and technology intricately composed
in the Hungarofuturist Manifesto is reminiscent of other lines
of thought and practice that loosely gather under the rubric of
“ethnofuturisms,” not least the Estonian Ethno-Futurism which
sets a challenging precedent for the nomenclature in general
and Hungarofuturism in particular. It stands for two different
sets of ideas born a couple of decades apart and both centered
around Finno-Ugrian cultural politics. One originates from a
1994 manifesto by a group of visionary young poets while the
other symptomizes the decadent rise of supremacist tendencies
in contemporary Europe. The former, riding the waves of anti-
authoritarian resistance at the tail end of the Soviet era, conveyed
a minority history of domestic alienation and social misrecogni-
tion within a larger context of international isolation, signaling
not much of a choice other than developing forward-looking
aspirations via a move backwards. Authors of the manifesto
and members of the movement they set out to inspire for years
to come embraced a conflicted syncretism of pre-Christian
traditions, Orthodox influences, political neopaganism, an almost
sacrosanct doctrine of democratic transitology, as well as an
obsession with techno-utopianism. Simply put, all this makes
Ethno-Futurism an underexplored hallmark of the long 1990s.
 However, the movement remained mainly
concerned not with a particular “ideology”
but the prospect of a “modus vivendi,” a
survivalist strategy that was as much a
Notes on the Hungarofuturist Manifesto
matter of a way of living peculiar to an
ethnic identity and allowing for its con-
stant reformation as it was fundamentally
inscribed with a will to integrate into a
world of burgeoning globalization even if
at the cost of compromising a resolute sense
of political determination. Significantly,
the onset of the internet, prime time for
cyberpassing, was hailed as the basis for
a sense of global orientation as it was
perceived to allow for reverting historical
time to the ground zero of a virtual realm
that seemed equally distant from anything
ever developed by any nation in the world.
Fast-forwarding to the contemporary
moment, the political ambiguities of this
New Agey vision of spiritual positivity
in the age of global capital, sliding over
a veneer of allegedly post-ideological
consensus, have been betrayed by Estonian
right-wing populists whose unabashedly
racist and xenophobic exploitations carry
no explicit reference to the actual history
they appropriate, cannibalizing its humanist
optimism with a fanatic sense of tribalist
futurism.
The Hungarofuturist Manifesto, how-
ever, passionately takes issue with the
theoretical foundations that permit such
political shortcomings. It is well aware
of how the cultural mechanisms of late capitalism can serve
as conduits for the re-establishment of settled boundaries and
anachronic forms of power, whether religious, nationalist, or
authoritarian. The caveat, then, is that if the intrinsic temporal
tensions that define ethnofuturisms are not well navigated or
not strategically tied up with a refusal to entertain apolitical
renditions of one or another received belief system, that is, if
not attended to explicitly as a matter of chronopolitics (which
is, of course, always already subtended by geopolitical real-
ities), they might simply end up falling prey to the tyrannies
of ethnic supremacy.
Such political consciousness is expressed in terms of a general
agenda to tackle the monopoly of “nationalist ideology” over “na-
tional and historical myths,” to initiate a practice of “experimental
psychogeography” that “loosens the temporality of the nation”
and summons the “alternative realisms” of a “Hungarofuturist
mutational identity.” Instead of any middle ground, the prospect
here is to tap into the innermost ends of national imaginaries by
reorienting their territorial attributes toward the extreme outside,
as if extending the terms and conditions of belonging along the
Möbius strip of alienation. “We demand a Hungarian Outer Space
instead of a Conservative Sky!” Referencing the conquest of the
Carpathian Basin, the Manifesto reads, “The New Land­Taking
11
demands a national XENOPOLITICS and national XENOAESTHETICS!.” This
clearly shows how the collage of certain incommensurables serves
as a means to craft a poetics of estrangement only to repurpose it as
part of a critical discourse on political and cultural identity. (Also
repurposed is the concept of a “xenic culture,” part of the biomedical
vocabulary, as it is placed in the vicinity of “ethnic” constructs and
expressions.) Furthermore, this “xenoaesthetic transformation,” through
which the “national identity becomes a stranger to itself,” seems
to speak to the power of myths when called forth via the interface
of migration as embodied in transgenerational realities. After all,
Magyars themselves are known to have emerged from a trans-tribal
alliance propelled by the teachings of the goddess Arvisura. All this
constitutes the proposed terms of “post-Hungarianness,” registered
in affordances for a future history of transnationalism.
The gravitational pull of the outside resonates all over the in-
terior, via a weird parallel drawn between the countryside and the
outer space, on the one hand, and a speculative rhetoric of loss and
grievance, on the other. The latter follows a suggestion to redraw the
“claustrophobic geography of the Hungarian national imaginary”
with recourse to its oceanic prehistory. Against a crypto-imperialist
fantasy often entertained by fanatic nationalists, whose imagination
is curtailed by a paralyzing pining for the lost territories as well as
the more than three million Hungarians that were left outside the
post-Trianon Hungary in 1920, the Manifesto advocates a scheme
of speculative mnemonics by shifting the frame of reference for
public grief: “Aquatic trauma entails a loss of our inner oceans:
every post-­Hungarian wants to return to the Original Ocean.”
Such tongue-in-cheek initiative, a move toward the “radicalization
of Hungarian mourning,” in fact reveals the Hungarofuturist appetite and aptitude for upscaling its agenda. By
making the attempt to connect with the deep time that underlies the geological foundations of Magyar settlements,
reaching for the outsides of normative chronologies, the Manifesto situates its proposed futurism in relation to
the cosmic dimension of entities that both precede and will perhaps outlive nationalist timelines. It is to highlight
the importance of attending to Hungarianness within a larger ecology of supraethnic agents, where human life is
imbued and in conversation with non- and inhuman elements, where one cannot be thought of without the other.
Back in the realm of realpolitik, the nationalist ideology has the tightest grip on the countryside, where the fear
of the outside currently thrives. To address this, the Manifesto confronts a certain image of the global metropolis
that is blemished not only with class inequality but also the concealed exploitation and stealthy abandonment of
the peripheries, belying the gloss of much futuristic development.
“The post­-Hungarian carnival is the apocalypse of rural Hungary…
But we will bring back the revenge of the peasants into the decadent
city!” The Manifeso also quotes Szabó here: “Being Hungarian
means, first and foremost, being a peasant,” and then asks, “What
does this mean for Hungarofuturists?” A crucial question, indeed.
The answer, however, surpasses an agenda of reaching out to those
communities that have been historically left out of the privileged
centers of modernization and goes as far as dubbing them the “living­
dead,” with whose help “the Hungarian nation may be reborn…
Through a zombification of the rural culture, we can regain the
power of the Hungarian race.”
The treatment of the issue at hand might seem to suffer from a
lack of tact. However, a frowning reader might slowly begin con-
necting the dots into a brighter constellation, following the other
tendencies already exhibited throughout the Manifesto. Zombies as
we know them emerged in the colonial Haiti and got appropriated by
and filtered through Hollywood. Their irreducibly material history
shows that the living dead, coercively deprived of reason and free
will among other presumably human essentials and pushed into
motion by an outside force, not only represent the social death of
enslaved bodies but are also their worst fear incarnate, that there
might be no salvation on the other side of physical death: the
postmortem persistence of dread and dispossession. Such horrific
imaginary was, of course, fueled by the transgenerational fact of
slavery and the ways in which its devastating effects unfolded on
an almost onthological scale. This history extends well into the
modern times, with the advent of proletarianized production and,
decades later, compulsory mass consumption, making zombies
highly symptomatic of the alienating effects of capitalist modernity
at large. In other words, the “technopeasant,” as the Manifesto puts it, has already been zombified. But what would
be a second-degree zombification?
Via the more contemporary cultural productions, zombies may come to propose a radically emancipatory
flipside of their former status. Not under the spell of a sorcerer or abiding by the commands of a master, they
instead appear in the shape of an autonomous and collective swarm intelligence. The bottom line is that zom-
bies are survivors, representative of a post-apocalyptic being. Zombies might have lost their human properties
but that has in fact made them independent of things that humans depended on. Zombies are freed from an
anthropocentric history that has for long evolved by the denial of that which has been deemed inhuman, un-
chained from constructed and heavily varolized distinctions between those considered worthy of life and those
rendered dispensable, condemned to death. In short, zombies usher in a posthuman subjectivity. But this radical
potential is brought about only if the figure of the zombie is repurposed in light of the racial and (trans-)loca-
tional history that its contemporary portrayals have often tried to eschew with. This is not a call for repatriation,
but an attempt to further associate Hungarofuturism with the diasporic history of zombies and the particular ways
in which they have been animated as registers of appropriation. Only then might post-Hungarianness fulfill its own
posthuman future.
In a sense, zombies cannot but mournfully remember. The world, or anything that remains of it, inevitably reminds
them of humans, and there are more than enough clues leading them to the realization that they are “related” to
humans – they are among the weirdly sentient remains of the human race. Zombies are indeed traumatized, but they
have managed to mobilize their trauma and radicalize their grievance away from a sense of paralysis and toward body land in the tip of the drill.
a reevaluation of the basics for sustenance. They have died once or twice, they have seen the world coming to an already featured alter/waste at the birth optic caboose, while justin

by Jake Tobin & Dominika Trapp

end, and yet they have survived, as walking proofs for an inexorable “xenoaesthetic transformation,” heralding the bleeds through the gauze of history.
(necessity of) another order of sense-making, of touch and sight and tactile perception, even of taste and beauty,
different from and perhaps indifferent to hitherto human variations thereof. Accordingly, the posthuman ethics and human numbers,
cruel optimism that zombies symbolize weirdly coincide with the long-lived (or undead) experience of indigenous not babies in particular,

Who Can Blame Them?

communities and their struggle for survival around the world, the communities for whom apocalypse has never becoming with the already already,
been an entertaining product of the capitalist culture industry, but a substrate for everyday reality. already.
the list is long.
back to the caves with the hodag, until it wears off already. having
– part iii – been having become with the many differently already.
[[“some may die so that others may live”]]
yeah right...
otherwises forward, we’re already actively working,
Last but not least, one might wonder about the ways in which, and the extent to which, Hungarofuturism as a discursive
practice would or will create publics of its own by circulating among them, giving rise to unheard-of constellations of we always have been,
commons (maybe chronocommons) and inspiring change – of course, only if registering and reevaluating the terms without assertion,
of public anticipation of change, to varying degrees, would be of concern to a program of sociocultural futurism. here on the tightrope,
In the same vein, Hungarofuturism shares its self-designated code with the Hungarian Forint – HUF. Therefore, it is which unravels to walking after already dead
obviously geared toward gaining currency and circulating far and wide, mediating a wide array of values and ducting with low G, high byproduct symbiosis with the stars.
them through circuits that together act as a complex vascular system, by which HUF brings itself into life, animating
itself and realizing its mandate. but they don’t think so –
But then there are some critical meeting points, where the “currency” must first get exchanged to keep the task of hyphen C, E, N, E,
mediation possible, to remain current and relevant. And there is always some friction at these meeting points, always oppressed fresh-water species?
something of the mediated energy, value, desire, belief or idea lost in translation. The question, then, is how to capture bodysoulminds still walking,
and redirect that which is lost back into the circuits of a futuristic current. As far as ethnofuturisms are concerned, aspirationally already
there is a latent tendency to work it through the friction with recourse to a relational immanence, one which allows
2100 AD.

13
each ethnofuturism to remain responsive (as in both absorbing and reflecting) the radiation of
another ethnofuturism. Such relational futurism (or, as a matter of disciplinarity, Comparative (we’re only partly joking)
Notes on the Hungarofuturist Manifesto

Futurism) works toward the materialization of shared imaginaries across diverse technocultural the rope
climates, unearthing the conditions of possibility for long- or ever untrodden landscapes to big numbers
rise from within transregional spectrums, whether factual or fictitious. big toll in animals
For HUF to tap into such latency would mean to expand on its interscalar capacities, acting
as a vector that runs through ethnic dimensions, approximates cosmic magnitudes, and draws what with all the falling despite
on xenofuturist orbits. Speaking of the “Original Ocean,” the Manifesto mentions Árpád – the the leashes, but the air,
military commander, remembered for his mythical grandeur, who realized the political entity the air.
of a Hungarian federation and established the Kingdom – and equates him with Captain the syllage is great.
Nemo, the enigmatic, anti-imperialist, ur-seapunk character of Verneian mythologies. Most what a great time.
significantly, perhaps, and bracketing off the fin de siècle sentiments, this equation evokes
Nemo’s submarine Nautilus that held an image of the world in itself and, more importantly, who can blame them?
carried the motto “Mobilis in Mobili,” which stands for conscious and strategic navigation
through the seas of ambivalence, absorbing the ripples of change and changing accordingly,
steering an ever-shifting image of the world away from one wave of transformation and riding
it upon another. Two individuals escape the ideological dom- The source of citations used: C. Clarke,
ination of Climate Week NYC 2019 through Adele and Haraway, Donna. Making
Tinder. Happy to have met another fellow on Kin Not Population. Chicago: Prickly
the run, they celebrate, writing/accumulating Paradigm Press, 2018.
an accidental/pillaged bed of ideas, to carve
out another nest, and have a good time.
FUBU
“When is it time to dream of
another country or to embrace
other strangers as allies or to
make an opening, an overture,
where there is none?”
– Saidiya V. Hartman
FUTURISM
by Mia Imani Harrison
It begins with the Sun Ra Arkestra chanting “It’s after the end of
the world” we listen and wait for future memory • Can a language
without gender hold salvation for Black womxn • answered the
question before • it was asked, but was never seen/read • we define
and clarify the freedom dreams • Like when fubu made its way to
Hungary • A consensual hallucination or a Mothership connection •
It doesn’t make any sense which way you go we build corrective
hxstory • Where we transcend guilt versus shame. Where Aquarians
and Hungarians come from • It is a bridge to nowhere • we come
from a re-digitalization of dreams called culture. Where we show
what it means to be unstuck in time. Humming memory back into
our minds • It lingers outside of historical reality • we are the sonic
textures from Dobogókő, Detroit • The shared African American
and Eastern European experience • One outside of the projections of
places haunted by their lost futures, beyond hyphenated realities that
repeat the same vowels • It extends beyond the cosmodrama of the
beginner’s mind. we embrace “The Marvelous” and the “miserab-
lism”. These futurisms intertwine, further into space, further inside •
15
It is when traveling south and traveling east is no longer grieving in
darkness • we play in the shadows of algorithmic-design • Who can
become part of this emancipatory project • Others whose lives have
been largely washed away from collective memory/ washed back
into collective myth • “I am a dream that the black man dreams
long ago. I’m actually a present sent to you by your ancestors.”
– Sun Ra • fubu [pronounced “foo-boo”] stands for “for us by
us”, a clothing brand created in 1991 by Daymond John, and his
close friends, Keith Perrin, J. Alexander Martin and Carl Brown.
They came up with the idea to make and sell John’s tie-top hats as
a means of making “easy money”. Daymond mortgaged his home
for $100,000 turning half of the house into a factory and the other
half into living space for “team fubu”. Their philosophy was to
make clothing for the consumer by the consumer. They turned their
dream into a reality. • fubu transcended the limits and restrictions
that are placed on not only the Black imagination but also the visual
articulation of Blackness by becoming an international success.
The brand eventually made its way to villages within Hungary
where it came into contact with future Hungofuturists. • What if
the term, fubu and the ideology around the brand was extended
into a futuristic realm? What if this mindset was used as a form
of international and intersectional-community building to dissolve
the illusions of national and cultural borders? • Where we could
create realities that were for us by us. Could this be the bridge
between two seemingly separate worlds: African-Americans and
Eastern Europeans. Could this third reality allow us both to re
[imagine] and re [member] ourselves outside of the confinements
of our present / past material existence.

Memories of Easternfuturism
by Ulrike Gerhardt
“The use of ‘-futurism’ here is not intended to reference Futurism as movement,
neither is it an explicit reference to the ‘futuristic’. Instead ‘-futurism’ is antici-
pating a future, it signifies a defiant cultural break, a projection forward into what
is, beyond ongoing eurocentric, hegemonic narratives.”
In the above quotation, artist and author Sulaïman Majali defines ethnofuturism as
a conceptual entity distinct from the Italian artistic movement of the same name. With
reference to Majali’s thesis, the media theorist Jussi Parikka identifies anticipation
and projection as cultural forces that function as hinges for temporal joists, enabling
the gathering of materials, affects, visuals, representations and sounds around us that
are unclassifiable in and of themselves and only notionally meaningful. Needless to
say that different (counter-)histories and (counter-)futurisms are only comparable to
a limited extent, given their divergent theoretical, popular and artistic expressions.
Afrofuturism, for example, crucially aims to counter a (neo-)colonial history, present
17
and future by creating ethnic and race-based collective imaginations that challenge and
question Western-European epistemologies. As practiced by racialized, marginalized and
minority identities, this imaginative disruption or interruption of Western modernity’s
essentially “whitewashed imaginations about the future” cannot readily be compared
with or translated into other futurist projects due to historical, discursive and geograph-
ical differences – categories like race, ethnicity, diaspora and territory have a decidedly
different meaning in a postsocialist context than they do for the former colonies, for
example, the stakes being incommensurable for the victims of colonialism and the
former colonial powers that are still hesitant to accept responsibility. It is not incidental
that seemingly coherent concepts, such as Gulf futurism, conceal regionally diverse
situations and discourses. In this context – such being the case for the comparatively
new Easternfuturism – it must be assumed that there are diverse sets of definitions and
interpretations. Two members of the writer and artist group T+U (Technologie und
das Unheimliche), Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z. Nemes, are drafting the Hunga-
rofuturism (2017) manifesto, which aims to challenge the appropriation of national
and historical myths by nationalistic ideology, by proposing the development of a new
experimental cosmology and “identity-poetical imagination.” Miklósvölgyi and Nemes
describe hungarofuturism as an aesthetic strategy and as “mythofiction” – with the
intention of multiplying so-called origin myths into absurdity. In his capitalist-critical
text on Easternfuturism, the cultural theorist and co-editor of Kajet Journal, Petrică
Mogoș, also refrains from referring to afrofuturism specifically, but turns his attention
instead to avant-garde musical works by the Czech composer, Erwin Schulhoff. He
singles out the Dadaist piece In Futurum from 1919 as an apposite description of the
postsocialist transformation, that is the historical situation of becoming, of a permanent
antagonistic transformation of vacuum-into-matter, thus creating an alternative, cultural
and geographic starting point for his postmarxist conception of Easternfuturism.
There are noticeably more examples from the field of the arts than from art theory
in the postsocialist context: in the field of dance, for example, performers
Rike Flämig and Zwoisy Mears-Clarke and the scenographer Anna Hentschel are
developing a project called POSTOST 2090 (2020). Their work looks to increase the
visibility of as yet unrepresented East-German perspectives, postulating a so-called
“Ossifuturismus” (East-German-futurism) that is based on the reactivation of feminist
utopias from 1987 to 1990 as well as the round table social model and which follows
the example of afrofuturist strategies and aesthetics. The performer Zwoisy Mears-
Clarke invokes the year 1984, in which Audre Lorde and Gloria I. Joseph together
with members of the Orlanda publishing house visited the Gethsemane church
lesbian group in East Berlin. Within the project, this meeting is recognized as the
birth of Ossifuturismus, and this crucial moment will be performatively instantiated
and celebrated over the course of the project through so-called “chronocollective”
settings, humorous fictional rituals and commemorative events. Another example
from international theatre is Roma futurism, which was postulated and conceived
by the actress, playwright and founder of the Giuvlipen Theatre, Mihaela Drăgan.
This movement represents an advanced cultural aesthetic at the intersection of Roma
culture, technology and witchcraft, creating new Roma heroines (“Roma-tech-
no-witches”), who make a stand against issues such as anti-Roma discrimination,
Brexit and inadequate climate politics.
Another noteworthy example is the Yiddish Cosmos project by the artist Yevgeniy
Fiks, which brings together the interlocking narratives of the Eastern-European
Jewish experience, the discovery of space, and the Soviet space travel program. In
her press release for the Yiddish Cosmos (2019) exhibition in The Center of Creative
Industries Fabrika in Moscow, the curator Maria Veits explains why Fiks points to a
futurist view of Soviet-Jewish emigrant history: he is speculating about the fiction-
al idea that, during the post-war emigration struggles between 1948 and 1991,the
Soviet cosmos became the embodiment of the Soviet homeland (Heimatland)
for Soviet Jews. For the Venice Biennale 2021, Fiks, Veits and the London GRAD
Gallery are planning The Yiddishland Pavilion, an alternative Pavilion for the
non-existent, imaginary country of the European Jews, so that their diasporic stories
and experiences are rendered visible.
The final example from this abridged list
of Easternfuturist projects references the
increasingly intertwined discourses of post-
socialism and postcolonialism in Eastern
Europe: the artist Ruth Jenrbekova of the Krëlex
Centre in Almaty, Kazakhstan, describes
how she draws inspiration from decolonial
texts by Édouard Glissant and Gloria
Anzalduato in order to comprehend Kazakh
identity, while thinking decolonisation out-
side of de-sovietisation by reactivating the
transcultural heritage of her country and
re-politicising local artistic practices.

Confronted with these transnational examples, it is striking
that, on both theoretical and practical levels, a complex mix of
theoretical, aesthetic, mythic and temporal ideas show virulence
in the postsocialist sphere. Artistic futurisms as well as future-ori-
ented artistic practices, employing specific techniques, offer an
opportunity to circumvent dominant collective imaginations and
subvert institutionalized temporal disjunctions, which produce
knowledge gaps that have led to the exclusion of postcolonial,
subaltern, anti-racist and queer-feminist discourses. The
exciting thing about Easternfuturism is that it does not re-
motely break away from racist, colonial, classist, patriarchal
and other discriminatory social imaginations. Instead, such
imaginations are productively integrated into artistic practic-
es: Easternfuturism informs a still undefined artistic strategy,
whose theoretical and aesthetic forms can be described as
non-essential, non-referential and global.
The concept of Easternfuturism may be demonstrably
new, but it should be pointed out that, according to the me-
dia theorist Inke Arns, the avant-garde reception of art from
former-Yugoslavia and Russia can be divided historically
into two currents: in its first phase Post-utopianism (SU) as
well as Retro-avantgarde (YU) (1980s) and in a second phase
Neo-utopianism (RUS) and Retro-utopianism (ex-YU) (from
1990). Many media-based artistic projects emerging from
Eastern Europe since the 1980s have shown an interest in
the historical avant-garde and in the concept of utopia. East-
ernfuturist works from the 2010s do not just call back to the
avant-garde, modernist appropriations or science-fiction, but –
firstly – occupy themselves with the structural experience
of absence as a consequence of postsocialist transformation
and its Renaming Machine (architecture that is left behind,
19
forgotten and ready for demolition, buildings and neighbor-
hoods, whose function and name have been replaced) and –
secondly – engage with corporeal-gestural heterochronic
cultures, emerging in both sub- and dominant culture, (e.g.
voguing, space travel, pop music, video game programming)
that can be activated mnemonically. Thirdly, through a reflex-
ive and synthetic artistic process (“mythofictionalisation”,
Miklósvölgyi and Nemes) diverse figures, tropes, myths
and antagonisms related to both postsocialism and Eastern
Europe are (re-)combined and intertwined; concurrently, the
process brings their respective temporalities, genealogies
and the modifications they make to collective imaginations
into relation.
Easternfuturism is still only defined in vague terms. My
suggestion, then, is that it could provide a starting point for
practices that aim to bring about a transcultural heterochro-
nous redefinition of (Eastern) modernity. By virtue of its ap-
propriative formulae and subversive formulae and techniques,
Easternfuturism is creating space for artists to build collages
out of heterogeneous temporalities, utopias, distorted/alien-
ated/defamiliarised myths and corporeal inscriptions.
The essay is an excerpt from the unpublished dis-
sertation text Morpholgien der Transformation
in postsozialistischer Videokunst (Leuphana
University of Lüneburg, Department of Cultural
Studies), without references.
Pannonian Betyár
In the Miocene epoch (about 2 million years ago) the Pannonian
Plain – roughly the present-day Hungary – was covered with water by Tamás Komoróczky
of the Pannonian Sea, as the fossils of sea creatures and other geo-
logical remains testify. This land has lost its previous character, its
face has changed. This period is now hidden in the deep-memory
of nature only.
The Magyars came to this place a thousand years ago from Asian
steppe, but from where exactly, nobody knows for sure. Neither
genetics nor linguistic research was able to localize the place of
origin of the Hungarians, and the origin-myths are like of the other
steppe tribes which migrated towards West. Also, his memory has
been lost through history.
The Magyars have gained foothold in the Carpathian Basin,
were integrated in the European hierarchies, and adopted a conti-
nental life-style.They have no collective maritime memories, there
is no trace of any relation of The Great Water. A new lost identity...
Thought-experiment:
One should refill the Pannonian Plain with water. Only the
mountains would remain visible, like during the Deluge. The
people would be forced to move to the mountains. The regions
would be separate islands, each with its own specialization. It
would result in an economic and cultural rivalry. Opening the salt
mines would assure the salinity of the water, and sea life would
reclaim the Pannonian Plain.
Fishery and shipbuilding would take over the traditional agrarian
labor, opening fresh perspectives. Nutritional habits would change.
On the national holiday, the Day of the Constitution, the traditional
five-draught horse-riding of the wild people of the Puszta would
become the five-dolphin ride of the brave fishermen.
The national anthem would contain “have lucky winds...”, and
the national flag would get a new symbol of the water. The State
Water-Post Authority would bring out a new series of stamps, etc...
 URN by LAND 3C

Mīniks Saulīkan weddi

Pirmanin wasarīkan
Ankstāi saūli etskīja
Mīniks izsklaitinna si
Mīniks aīns neikaūwa Deināinan enmilīwuns
Perkūns spārtai ernērtuns
Tennan pērpus perkīrta
- Iz saūlin izslaitinna s’
Deināinan enmilīwuns?
Deināinan enmilīwuns
En naktin aīns neikaūwuns?

Approx. middle of the 21st century

At first glance, the object looks like a traditional
19th century Eastern European container, carved
out of wood and colored in natural paint. However,
a careful examination of the visual markings on the
object, and radiocarbon dating has revealed that
the urn comes from the middle of the 21st century.
And, rather being made out of natural materials
only as it would have been several centuries ago,
this object is constructed of synthesized wood
and plastic hybrid material using the 3D printing
technology.
The urn originates from the Triangle Region, its
present landmass covering that in the 20th century
used to be known as separate nation-states in Eastern
and Central Europe, spreading up to three geogra-
phical points – the Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas.
The object was found specifically in the North-
ern part of the region, most recently bearing the
name of country Lithuania and, centuries before,
known as Prussia.
Using the urn, Dr. Selas Rubenšteinas of UK
(University of Klaipėda est. in former Lithuania)
and his research team managed to reconstruct a QR
code that leads to the portal found in the first-era
of West-Internet. A file was restored and converted
from a now obsolete format type MP3, and able to
be played with today’s technologies. According to
metadata, the song was recorded by an artist V.V in
West Baltic Old Prussian language that became extinct
by the early 18th century, with transcripted lyrics pre-
sented here by the urn. It allows a glimpse into the era
before the first two Internet archives were annihilated,
and before segmentation into the three Internets we
have in our days – Western, Chinese, Deep.
While the physical object displayed is valuable for
its unique material and similarities to the ancient tri-
bal urns, the digital fossil imprinted in QR bears the
meaning of connection with the lost age of the unified
Internet. There, information about every extinct
culture, language, and object had been gathered,
achieved, and analyzed in a detailed manner, to be
easily accessible to digitized nations. After most
of these archives were wiped out, many specific
cultural signs such as ancient languages were lost.
The data-rebuilding in the three new Internets saw
the emergence of artificial cultural narratives that
left out the precursor cultures of Eastern Europe.
Recreation of the fossil by Dr. Rubenšteinas unlocked
the seemingly lost data of the Triangle region, spar-
king a renewed interest in the Baltic tribes, languages,
and folklore, as well as resulting in the development
of the Baba-wave music genre.

Manifesto_Reflux_1_Psychogeography
by Daniel Hüttler
The radicalization of Hungarian mourning
is our only hope and our most effective
weapon! (HUF 1.1.1) We call for an updated
mourning that includes Aquatic trauma
(HUF 1.1.2) in the genealogy of Territorial
entitlement.
As Geology is built upon references
to Hyperobjects before it had to adapt to
them, it presents itself as the best candi-
date to revalidate the scientific project in
Hyperstitionary times. Geological registers
of what is now called the Carpathian Basin
show that there used to be a “Pannonian
Sea” covering the whole area that contem-
porary Hungarian nationalist claim to be
Magyar territory.
It was this sea that polished said terrain
into a semi-flat Plain wherein the 9th
century 7 semi-nomadic tribes established
their own Kingdom to exert sovereignty
via their unique language and strategic
advantage over the post-roman and holy
roman vestiges. Ever since then, the
Tribes, Kingdom and almost 2 centuries
of Ottoman occupation evolved into what
may territorially and culturally be called
“Hungary”.
Since the first World War, the Hungarians
have been forced to share the sovereignty of
the Plain with at least 5 other non-Magyar
administrative states. The Magyar tribes,
that lost half of their population during the
Mongolian invasions and have reunited
under Christianism again after more than
a third of their territory had been integrat-
ed into the Ottoman empire, are divided
once more. The Communist chapter of
the history of any culture has grown a big
void in its politics of identity that then
succumb to mere politics. The Ruling
class that emerged after the violent pseudo
democratization of the country nominate
themselves as Árpád did when HE united the
semi-nomadic tribes and as HIM they will
not hesitate to build up a dynasty by and
for themselves. As the King of the Magyars
back then, the sovereignty of the Carpathian
Plain is a key point in the legitimization of
the contemporary autocratic ruler. Due to
modern political structures, a campaign to
recover the lost land is impossible and this
only potentiality the Ruling Class’s propa-
ganda machine that sells its Citizens and
the Hungarian minorities that have stayed
in the Carpathian basin both: a PROMISE of
Magyar unification and the ENEMY that is
beyond the plain but still terrorizes it and
makes the Árpádian project impossible.
Oligarchs and Loyalists war against
imagination have flooded the basin that the
earth had decided to drain some millions
of years ago. They have filled it with their
history of what being and thus having to
become Hungarian means.
What political forces forget is that we
live in a time where it is MAN’s self-written
history that has to be flooded, not the spirit
of citizens and non-citizens.
We call everybody to remember be-
yond that which we have been trained to
remember. We call for the giant flood of
the long-dead sea that has shaped our past,
present, and future, we call for that bigger
force of righteousness that will drown Or-
bán in his own macho spit, the Carpathian
Basin belongs to no-one else than fluidity
itself, this is why we have to remove any
ideological embankment, let’s dilute its
phallocentric foundations to let the wave
take us all back home.
The claustrophobic scenario that politics
presents to us only serves them to keep
our imaginary potential inside a corner of
our already limited minds, not to mention
that they have the isolation of Hungarian
language as the perfect example and excuse.
A call for a Myoscenic flood speaks in
the language of geography and territorial
policy thus taking both with it. (HUF 1.1.4)
The original and traumatic experience
of a Lost-Abendland is that what builds
the bogus agenda of people in power, in
their eyes to be part of ancient 7 tribes
one must suffer and mourn this traumatic
experience in Magyar language. A flood
that precedes any instrumentalization of
the human mind in the name of the western
expansion erases any original experience,
we have never been that what others tell us
we are! and that what they want us to be is
peasants trained by centuries of patriarchal
survival strategies in order for them to be
legitimized as unifiers and leaders of a
millennial mass of lost souls.
The individual power each
of us has is to fight this pro-
paganda machine; strive
for a XENOAESTHETIC
transformation in order
to make national identity
based on MAN’s history
become a stranger to it-
self. We force a space of
liminality, a space with
the freedom of becoming
in which the search for
exceptional nationality
is deconstructed taking
huMANist, colonial- uni-
versalist illusions back
underwater (HUF 1).
We have already been territorially diluted
by the current monsoon, post-Hungarians
are already parasities living on the big
Gidran-Horse that carries just the few Thanatopolitical Theses
self-proclaimed coMANders: titan Oligarchs

Manifesto_Reflux_1_Psychogeography
and post-Soviet next-top motherfuckers.
For them, we are Pathogens that make
this horse sick and incapable to ride for
them from the tip of the Alps, through the
Danube bridges, stomp through the Tisza by Márió Z. Nemes
to safe and proclaim what past horse-MANs
promised them would be subordinante
to them.
And it is true that we are the ones building
this Trojan-horse on wheels instead of legs, 1. The nation springs from national extinction, hence its
letting big MANchildren play middle-ages commencement is inseparable from its conclusion.
castle siege, but it is about time that we 2. That nation, which lacks people, is the happiest among
tell them that we live in a geopolitical time nations, because it has attained pure ideality. If the nation wants
where play-time is the most valuable sign to be purified, it must consume and burn people like so many
of colonial privilege. biopolitical calories. This is the Great Hungarian Fat Reduction
Long live the anarchy of necro-archi- Program, the sole guarantee of our nation’s purity.
tectures (HUF 1.2.2.) which have built this 3. The most effective method of extinguishing people is
horse for them to sit to avoid them from overpopulation. An excessive national libido compels the
sitting on all of our chests while we sleep, people into a self-punishing orgy, an event that may be com-
as the past they did in the centuries before. pared to a sort of postmodern genocide, in which the people
If you do feel this weight while you dream suffocates itself in its own productivity. We call the agents of
it means you are this necro-horse and for this process traitors, who were always latently present at every
that I thank you. auto-genocidal orgy, from Mohács to Trianon.
It took huMANity millennia to develop 4. Little is known of the reproductive mechanisms of the
human, anima, and flora rights, but animals, traitor: the speed of its replication can be compared to self-emp-

25
flora and humans have always known that tying. The reproduction of the traitor is negative production,
they themselves have existed before some- counterproductivity, pushing out the Hungarians into nothing-
one decided what they can do with their ness. How does one become a traitor to one’s nation? By birth,
own. I dare to apply the same principle by giving birth, or by refraining from giving birth?
to our collective Necro-Horse which has 5. Born traitors are the children of traitors, but if we view
been ridden since centuries although it has this diseased, decadent, degenerate chain from a distance, there
always been dead and full of parasites. had to have been a primordial pair of traitors or at least one
self-fertilizing traitor, who was not a born traitor to begin with.
Treason surely had to start from somewhere! This moment is
the sacred moment when our nation was born, an instant in
which the self-replicating Hungarian emerged primordially
divided in itself. Hence, to be a Hungarian also means being
a Non-Hungarian. “Where there is a Homeland, then you can
be sure that has been sold.” (David A. Klinsky)
6. The masculine celebration of the Ancient Hungarian Seed
is also a mortuary celebration, during the course of which wo-
men are buried in a “breeding hole.” Sleep tight, maybe their
dreams shall bring a new progeny. Post-Hungarian reproduc-
tion does not need two biological genders: men, women and
Bushos alike are capable of unbinding the Hungaro-Plasma.
We support sexual relations with animals, plants and minerals,
for everything touched by Hungarians shall be Hungarian!
The Pannonia Sea hides in the stomach of this 7. Because the Hungarian is not a “reverse-Antheus” (Mi-
hály Babits), but rather a posthuman King Midas, the Hun-
horse, we just have to rip it open with our micro garianization of Being seems to be an unavoidable event. All
this composes an infectious flow, a victorious Eastern Plague,
but sharp teeth so our riders drown in what from that cannot be contained by the Western powers any longer.
“Turanium is the most radioactive nature-cultural formation;
their perspective is the most goreish nightmare. it becomes one with the infinity of the cosmos.”
HEXEN 2.0 by Suzanne Treister
 The Spectrality of National Identity and the Anachronistic Necropolitics
of Hungarofuturism
The role of controversial essayist and novelist Dezső Szabó cannot
be overemphasized in 20th-century elaborations of the Hungar-
ian national concept. Szabó’s at times witty and sharp, on other
occasions politically highly incorrect takes not only combine a
nationalist, agrarian and populist critique of the Horthy-regime
with an atavistic yet paradoxically modern Romanticism and
philosophy of life, but also hybridize with radical and democratic
strains of political thinking. In his politically-themed articles,
Szabó couches his narrative in terms of an explicitly Nietzschean
semantics of life and national vitality. Against the reactionary
conservatism of the Horthy regime, Szabó advocates for a spe-
cifically Hungarian form of biologically grounded nationalism,
situating it as an alternative to Western liberalism, German Na-
tional Socialism and Soviet Communism alike. Szabó’s language
is permeated by biological categories and phrases. Especially
interesting is the 1938 article, The Nationalism of Tomorrow and
Democracy (A holnap nacionalizmusa és a demokrácia). In it, the
author argues that the “nationalism of tomorrow” is “a political
system which is more representative than standard democracies,
extending democracy to the entire division of labor in society,
allowing all citizens to participate in forming their own fate, all
collaborating in building the life of the community, the historical
life and the state. Here the “nationalism of tomorrow” is held to
resemble a self-organizing biological system, which is capable
of creating and maintaining its own framework. Hungarians have
no future in a neo-feudal system: the affirmative politics of the
future must extend to a reorganization of the “historical life” of
the Hungarians. This discourse conceives of politics in explicitly
organicist terms. The basic problem of the 1930s, as Szabó sees
things, is a contradiction between state and nation. The reactionary,
conservative regime – the “State” – is out of touch with the life
of the nation, and is therefore a hindrance; “official Hungary” is
a parasite living off the unofficial, sub-governmental Hungarian
community. Against the mainstream conservative narrative, Szabó
maintains that the Horthy system is a basically colonial structure,
subordinated to German economic and political interests, exploiting
the authentic Hungarians (the “Nation”), while counterfeiting
and expropriating Hungarian identity for its own selfish political
purposes. In Szabó’s view the organic, real Hungarians are op-
pressed by power, and are unable to reach their full potential in
the limited political framework.
by Márk Horváth and Ádám Lovász
In this vitalist and populist narrative there is a historical teleol-
ogy at work. In many ways, Szabó resembles anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist strands of thought: the imperialist structures of
today are preventing the elaboration of an organic, free movement.
The main crime of colonialism on this modernist emancipative
view is that the oppressed people is being prevented from “real
participation” in truly forming its own fate. For the emancipative
teleology, the liberation of the people/nation is a fundamentally
necessary chapter in history. Opposing what he sees as false rep-
resentation, Szabó believes that an authentic, direct democracy can
achieve the impossible, namely a confluence of state and nation.
If complete popular representation will be achieved, then the life
force – until now oppressed and silenced by the “lords”, can realize
29
its full potential. It is especially interesting how the institution of
the monopoly is represented in this narrative of national liberation.
“The conspiracy, the cartel” – writes Szabó – “guarantees power”
for select groups “over the entire competition of life”, defrauding
the people. Hence, the supposed economic liberalism of the Horthy
regime is really a facade hiding the fact that the “competition of
life” has already been decided in advance in favor of the elites, to
the detriment of the people. In this teleological view, the corrupt
neo-feudal conditions in 1930s Hungary are preventing historical
progress. As the nationalist theoretician states, “democracy is
the natural internal gravitational force of human history and all
historical communities.” History is conceptualized as an almost
physical force of gravity, pulling actors along with it, heading
from one state to the other, until national self-determination
is achieved. The free individual and the free community alike
determine their own mode of life. Szabó is a radical democrat
who is seeking to prove that dictatorship lacks any natural basis.
Democracy is good because it is natural. Every dictatorship of
any political persuasion is on the wrong side of history, for this
form of government is alien to the self-organization of life’s
spontaneity, and Szabó is adamant that this will be evidenced by
the coming collapse of the Horthy regime. National Socialism
and all other totalitarianisms are anti-vital and non-spontaneous
in their outlook, and hence doomed to failure. Within Szabó’s
entire narrative, there is an implicit optimism regarding the future.
The vital “nationalism of tomorrow” must bring life, while the
inorganic, bureaucratic, conservative state of today is a sclerotic,
machine of death. The artificially constructed, museal national
idea offered by the Horthy regime is tragically incapable of
guaranteeing the future of the Hungarians, but neither are the
various import-ideologies. Against most of the ideological al-
ternatives of the 1930s, Szabó proposes an organic, immanent,
materially-grounded self-organizing nationalist vitalism. We
must return to the nation as material basis: “the basic intuition
of the nationalism of tomorrow is that the fundamental guarantee
of the Nation and the State alike, is the unfettered, spontaneous
freedom of the historical life-system, as elaborated through the
living instinct of the individual’s internal mechanisms.”
For all intents and purposes, Szabó does not seem to reckon
with the place of the death-drive, Thanatos, in the ensemble of
instinct. What if the “living instinct of the individual’s internal
mechanisms” is itself already infected with a will to nothingness?
What can the “nationalism of tomorrow” do, when confronted
with the sick internality of a nation that self-destructively wills
its own extinction? In other words, what happens to the concept
of a national identity, when eclipsed by the prospect of a future
extinction? The conclusion seems inevitable: vitalist national-
ism, consciously or unconsciously, is a one-sidedly naive affir-
mation of life as positivity, excluding the real heterogeneity of
real processes. There is no life without death, and any political
philosophical outlook which denies this fact seems superficial,
to say the least.
As distinct from Dezső Szabó’s vitalist nationalist concept of
the nation, Hungarofuturism (HUF) represents a different idea of
national identity. In a theoretical sense, HUF offers an exit from
life-affirming modes of politics. All existing national concepts,
from the left to the right, emphasize the will to live, the life of
the nation. It is especially interesting in this light to read in the
Hungarofuturist Manifesto of the “living dead” character of
the Hungarian rural idyll in point 2.6.2.: “We must accept the
possibility of producing the living-dead, so that the Hungarian
nation may be reborn. We tear apart the remnants of Hungarian
peasant culture as if it were a juicy, fatty piece of pork. Through
a zombification of rural culture, we can regain the power of the
Hungarian race.” By mobilizing irony, the Manifesto repeats
Szabó’s vitalist language, in a distorted and mirrored way. At the
same time, we must also call attention to a danger intendant upon
all uses of irony, namely the risk of becoming a mere parodistic
rejection of atavistic nationalism. In our view, HUF is something
more than a tendency opposing national discourses. The HUF
movement interprets the contemporary Hungarian reality in large
measure through the lens of postcolonialist theory. Rather than
just opposing the colonial condition in the manner of modernist
modes of emancipatory politics, postcolonialism also investigates
the antinomies of the anti-colonialist nationalisms. HUF is a kind
of speculative, experimental thought, whose subversive potential
lies in both its reflexive self-distancing from standard anti-nation-
alist, cosmopolitan, Eurocratic and liberal democratic narratives
and its critique of garden-variety Hungarian nationalism. The
authors of the HUF Manifesto, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z.
Nemes envision a “posthungarian awakening”, in the context
of which the Hungarians become “a multitude of races.” The
postcolonial perspective helps us maintain pluralism, rejecting
a whitewashing type of ethnocentrism while also preventing the
self-colonizing reflex from operating.
Our analysis can be deepened through a reading of Pheng
Cheah’s postcolonial notion of “spectral nationality.” According to
its self-definition, the HUF movement is an ironic mode of “mourn-
ing” politics and national identity alike. In a temporal sense, this
position is accompanied by the necessity for “anachronism.” HUF
rejects all linear and teleological modes of history. In a social
space colored by spectrality, self-colonializing discourses relating
to a common “European future” and “European progress” are just
as impossible as the “better future” promised by nationalism.
All teleological politics is rejected by HUF. As the Manifesto
notes, “The decomposition, reprogramming and rebuilding of
the ‘nation-machine’ (András Borbély) is a goal directed at the
restoration of an everpresent anachronistic time.” Reprogramming
is therefore also an anachronistic mode of not so much replacing
the concept of a nation but, rather, of expropriating it, of taking it
back. The concept of national identity becomes a spectral, living
dead presence, which is also strangely capable of multiplying
itself into various novel cultural constellations, decomposing
and reconstructing itself ceaselessly. Cheah’s book, Spectral
Nationality, at first sight deals with topics that are distant from
the Hungarian cultural context. Its theme is colonial literature,
Indonesian and Kenyan in particular. For our purposes, however,
Cheah’s work contains several important insights that can be of
help in elaborating an unashamedly deconstructionist-oriented
spectral Hungarian national identity. Ruthless theory cannot
compromise with any established ideological construct.
Against the colonial condition, the subalterns attempted to
31
appropriate a modernist alternative form of historical progressiv-
ism. According to this “decolonial” outlook, “the people exhibit
the epigenetic capabilities of an organism. It develops according
to inner rational laws and purposes, which are juxtaposed to the
colonial state’s brute force and might and the empty legality
of its laws.” As opposed to the self-serving illusion of Western
progress, the colonial state represents a brake on historical evo-
lution, preventing the people from living freely. “Brussels must
be stopped”, to quote an example from recent Hungarian gov-
ernment propaganda. The negation of the negation is supposed
to transcend the Satanic, evil, inorganic colonial power, creating
a free, decolonized social space free of oppression. However, the
very duality of good vs evil, friend vs foe, brings the possibility
of confusing and hybridizing categories to the fore. Brussels is
the cosmopolitan enemy of the good Hungary, the central, bu-
reaucratic global power machine restricting the productivity of
the Hungarian people. As Cheah writes, commenting upon the
decolonial mindset, “the colonial state is satanic. But precisely
because it is a defective by-product of modern knowledge’s
life-producing magic, it is haunted by a second ghost, the native
awakening.” Brussels is a colonizing-machine, an alienated, an-
ti-vital negativity, a pole against which the life-affirming kuruc
Hungarians must struggle. While the colonialist Western Europe
is dying of its decadense, the revolutionary nations fighting
against it must build on a locally organized demographic growth
potential that, ironically, seems to perpetually elude us. In the
imagination of the conservative nationalist discourse, Western
Europe is conceptualized as a living-dead, decadent region of
social liberalism, being destroyed by terrorism, feminism, and
multicultural chaos. In the meantime, the Hungarian body politic
can replicate itself successfully, through a future demographic
explosion yet to arrive, but always on the horizon. Two visions –
the negation and the affirmation of the nation – stand in contrast
to one another, but yet, they can be exploded into a new, strange
symbiosis. This hybridization is what HUF, as a xenobiologically
post-political discourse, seeks to accomplish. Against the fed-
erative, bureaucratized governing structures of the 21st century
and the centralized nation-state form of the 19th century, HUF
proposes an alternative line-of-flight: “Long live the archaeology
of zombie-media, long live the anarchy of necro-architectures!”
Anti-colonialist nationalism differentiates between the good
specter, the prospect of national awakening, and the evil specter,
the exploitative global power game, the empire oppressing the
subaltern peoples. These two specters haunt one another, the
background hidden global imperialism and the kuruc mentality.
Conventionally, the anti-colonialist modes of politics placed their
trust in the good specter. Until now oppressed, the colonized
peoples shall awaken, rising up, banishing the ghost of the op-
pressive West by appropriating the Enlightenment for its own
political purposes. But deconstructionism recognizes that no
banishing of evil spirits can be entirely successful. In Cheah’s
view, through casting out the evil demon, “death is not so much
eradicated but sublated. It is returned back to, subsumed by, and
interned within the movement of self-present life as its determi-
nate negation.” However much its seeks to deny its own immanent
material conditions, nationalist conservatism is incapable of re-
sponding adequately to the likelihood of extinction. Necrostruc-
tures emerge, rendering every future-oriented political narrative
questionable. Western Europe in general seems incapable of
coming to terms with its own colonialist past. Negativity and
death are correlates of the nation state, as well as the ex-coloni-
al core. Emancipation does not, in itself, resolve the dialectics of
thesis and antithesis, for the newly liberated peoples inevitably
fall prey to a new negativity, a new possession. Nationalist dis-
course, even the anti-colonial variety, the founding myth, is always
already compromised by its involvement in modernism, nation-
alism itself being a modernist configuration. Writing on the na-
tional self-determination movements in the early 20th century
Dutch East Indies (today known as “Indonesia”), Cheah explains
that the self-organizing of the indigenous revolutionaries was
dependent upon media of European origin, such as newspapers.
No media is entirely neutral, always already being infected by a
certain logic of power. Furthermore, a problem of all revolution-
aries is the paradox of visibility: if the cause is to be advanced,
a certain publicity is required, but too much publicity can under-
mine the cause by unwittingly assisting surveillance by power.
Modernity promises emancipation for the colonized, while the
public sphere offers transparency, leading to a supposedly better,
more democratic, in a word, more civilized, social future. The
discourse of transparency promises liberation from subordination
to power. Yet, as Cheah reminds us, “the transparency rendered
by critical publicness can also be the visibility of the glasshouse.”
By learning the language of the colonizer, becoming thereby
intellectuals, the anti-colonial organizers not only prepare the
conditions for a future liberation, but also make possible a great-
er visibility and decodability. We become transparent, revealing
our interiority to the lifeless techniques of modernity. The HUF
movement recognizes the danger latent in the public sphere,
reacting with a stratagem of parody: “The reprogramming of the
nation-machine does not create organic knowledge and narratives,
but anachronisms, phantomlike events in which the incompati-
bility of the various elements hybridizes history and the cosmos
until the very moment of ‘overidentifiacion.’” Against vitalism,
politics dedicated to retrieving national energies, HUF diverts the
nation-machine in the direction of negativity, until collapse is
achieved. Antivital zombified energies of death are unleashed
from the cracked structures. A line-of-flight is opened for writing.
Defeating the vampirism of codes, HUF operates a differential
writing with its active parasitism, infecting the rotten body pol-
itic. We speak here of an animated automatic writing, wherein
the author not only acts in the manner of a stand-in for somebody
else, but also uses their own tongue in a strange, minoritarian
manner. Language is thereby minoritized, hybridized, immunized
to seriousness, through the parodistically necrotic inversion of
nationalist vitalism. The future corpse of the national body pol-
itic is used by the perverted automatic writer, letting negativity
flow into dead 19th century modernity. 1848 must be buried
again and again by a collective Világos surrender. The modern
democratic ideals of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution end up at
the ironically darkened enlightenment. As opposed to writers
animated by European Enlightenment, whose goal is a national
Bildung, the degenerate, darkly enlightened author achieves an
“anti-Bildung.” The protagonist of an Indonesian novel com-
mented by Cheah, Jacques Pangemanann, is a self-hating Javan
official, who follows French cultural values, slavishly serving
the Dutch colonial authorities. The two types of culture, howev-
er, enter into a conflict, one that exposes Pangemanann himself
as a degenerate self-deceiver. Instead of liberation and enlight-
enment, the character slips into alcoholism and madness. Pange-
manann shows us another possibility, a maladaptive enculturation,
an initiation into decadence, a “work of death as a process of
degeneration and miscultivation, an anti-Bildung that kills the
promise of a future life.” The Dark Enlightenment inverts the
cultural patterns of European modernity, rechanneling them into
a destructive cultural atrophy that is almost undifferentiable from
the absence of culture. The figure of the alcoholic bureaucrat
represents, in a way, the futureless foreclosure of a stagnant,
infertile European modernity incapable of reproduction, or even
of manufacturing a coherent meta-narrative. Spirit-writing, in-
fected by the influence of alcohol and delirium, is a movement
that “makes desire take flight through all the assemblages, rub
up against all the segments without settling down in any of them,
and carry always farther the innocence of a power of deterrito-
rialization that is the same thing as escape (the schizo-law).” As
a consequence of anti-Bildung, the components of the national
body politics proceed to decompose, zombifying the national
identity, transforming it into a useful automaton. The transfor-
mation never brings a better, more developed condition. Rather,
change means here the failure of a political project. Through a
demonic repetition, the automatic writer creates an anti-Bildung
that deconstructs the European norm of self-reflexivity so cher-
ished by the Western tradition. Dark Enlightenment is a moment,
confronting us with the impossibility of reconciling modern
rationality with life. Intelligence cannot be domesticated any
longer, in the context of a reunification of knowledge with an
already rotting, zombified life. Pangemanann cannot return to
the servile, colonial mode of being, but neither does he have any
future. Moribund European rationality cannot be recorporealized:
“as the condition that allows the state to haunt the emerging
nation-people, the spectrality of modern reason is also a remind-
intimate and interior.” HUF politics is a conjuring that consciously
exploits with the subversive potential of psychopolitical occult- Cataclysm with Laughing Gas
ism. Against overly simplistic vitalist nationalism, it is aware of
the complexity of national identity, reimagining the nation as an
ambivalent body politic, filled with occult materialities communi-
cating their own living dead absent presences. A new, subversive
time is injected into the ossified body of the moribund nation,
reanimating the national narrative. The concept of the nation is
filled with a fluid anachronism, creating a monstrous new life.
All this results in a temporal desynchronization, breaking up the

er that cannot be converted into living flesh.” Similarly, HUF
signifies a currency which is unexchangeable, occupying an
uncertain place among the currencies of the world. The spec-
tralized nation waiting for its own extinction is individualized,
being already absent. Contemporary modernizing discourses,
haunted by the experience of hyperinflation that made necessary
the introduction of the forint in the first place, speculate upon
the future date of the introduction of the Euro. Yet the Eurozone
itself is far from stable, lending credence to a possible scenario
in which, by the time Hungary becomes eligible to join, the Euro
too will have ceased to exist. The future replacement of the HUF
by the EUR leads to a haunting rearticulation of a Eurofuturism
that, somewhat similar to the Communist utopia, is perpetually
by László Győrffy
linear temporal perspective, creating a “broken presence bereft of
self-identity.” At this point, the failure of decolonization meets
with the bankruptcy of modernization, and the two teleologies
collapse into a multiplicity of organic and inorganic pieces. We
are awakened, but not liberated. We realize that there never was
any real difference between pure life and the impurity of the in-
organic. Oppressive intensities flow through oppressed softness,
the time of the colony haunts the time of the postcolonial global
economy. Emancipation and oppression, each other’s doubles,
mime the end of history, repeating forever.

of Hungarofuturism
Necropolitics
Identity and the Anachronistic
The Spectrality of National
on the horizon, but never seems to arrive. The self-colonizing
liberal democratic consensus, informed by a progressive teleol-
ogy, supposes “Europe” (exemplified by Hungary’s model
neighbor, Austria) to be a logical destination, an end-point for
Hungary. The political economy underlying both currencies is

revealed as bankrupt. The Hungarofuturist automatic writers
convert currencies they use into entropic networks of commu-
nication. If we follow the spectral pathway, we can see the in-
commensurability of intelligence and life. The situation is further
complicated by the unexchangeability, the circumstance of illi-
quidity having frozen the market of the future. A mutual haunt-
ing already presupposes a transitory zone, in which immense
transactions, even large-scale population exchanges can be
achieved unproblematically. In a xenobiological sense, the de-
mographic crisis “the post-Hungarian land-taking” becomes a
happy event, and not a national catastrophe. The disappearance
of the Hungarian ethnicity, the demographic transformation of
the Carpathian Basin means a new opportunity for impossible
exchanges. Perhaps disappearance is actually a metamorphosis.
It cannot be forgotten that no disappearance is complete. The
place of the extinct Hungarians is taken over by ghostly multitudes,
who are endowed with an inorganic, post-Hungarian consciousness.
As Márió Z. Nemes states in an article on the Hungarofuturist
outlook, “Hungarofuturism is a phantomlike visitation, leading
to the ‘dislocation’ of the organic, for it exposes the organic, the
sovereign and the linear as a ‘badly constructed’ prosthesis.” The
HUF stratagem is a deconstruction that does not attempt to merely
destroy the structure of the conformist nation-machine, but also,
through overidentification, invites, evokes and conjures irritating
anachronisms. It is a form of politics that applies the following
insight: “the specter, similar to the partisan, is always ‘outside’
(in the night, in the forest, in the garden, etc.), but this distance
is always entering again, knocking, giving news of its presence,
permeating the atmosphere, including everything we thought is
33
References: Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality. Passages of
Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.;
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Kafka. Toward a Minor
Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986.;
Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Z. Nemes. Hungarofuturist
Manifesto. Translated by Ádám Lovász. Budapest and Berlin:
Technologie und das Unheimliche, 2017.;
Márió Z. Nemes. “Hungarofuturista kísértetképzés.” In A jel-
en időzítése. Művészet és időtapasztalat. Edited by Márió Z.
Nemes, 90-99. Szentendre: Ferenczy Múzeum, 2018.; Dezső
Szabó. Tanulmányok, esszék. Budapest: Kortárs, 2007.
“The sun deluges its chemical holocaust to the earth with
blinding indifference”, writes Jake Chapman in his book, Meat-
physics, a deranged post-apocalyptic writing-machine made almost
illegible by computer viruses. Through the mutual collapsing of
fact and fiction, Chapman creates an aesthetics of pure disorder.
It is a rendition of the end that rends us in the process, lacerating
the reader’s eyes. The end is also the beginning of Csaba Kis
Róka’s posthuman imagery, which undoes the human image and
its figural representation by mixing the codes. As the philosopher
Gilles Deleuze writes, “A multiplicity is, in the most basic sense, a
complex structure that does not reference a prior unity. Multiplic-
ities are not parts of a greater whole that have been fragmented,
and they cannot be considered manifold expressions of a single
concept or transcendent unity.” The New Disorder exhibition is
itself in the form of a system. Screens show the latest news in
the form of Kis Róka’s paintings. They are interminable states of
exception (Átmeneti állapot /Transition State, 2019). There is no
need for puppets covered in vomit or sour-faced mummies sitting
atop a Ministry of Injustice, manipulated by toned Fuckfaces,
because the network of bodies-without-organs forms a complete
universe of its own, in a self-organizing manner. There is nothing
futuristic in this universe, for the time of images is a FUTURUM PER-
FECTUM, deriving from the certainty that Apocalypse has already
happened: the future was here all along, we just didn’t know it yet.
Our bodies are ill-equipped for survival, our organs superfluous.
An eukaryote collectivity is forming in the grainy air: two feet
long, four feet longer – every limb is just a burden, a reminder
that evolution has lied to us. Gaia was on the side of the monsters
and mutants all along, unleashing Hecatoncheires into the world.
Why is survival better than annihilation? Kis Róka’s transhistorical
poliptochon (Green Piece Of Shit, 2019) has no space for humanist
illusions: this work mobilizes a mutational prism, in which sexuality
and other meaningful interactions are reduced to a promiscuous
microbial exchange. The Anthropocene is nothing but the afterglow
of a prior microbial explosion. Homo sapiens too is filthy, unclean,
impure. As Lynn Margulis, misanthrope biologist declared, the
human species “reeks of arrogance fraught with ignorance.” The
human is the waste-product of microbial evolution. Kis Róka
chooses a fitting scene for the exhibition of his art: the basement
of the former Haggenmacher Beer Factory, located underneath
the Budafok limestone hills, where fungi live in hidden nooks and
crannies, elongating themselves from the stomach of the factory
along the walls – a truly refreshing change from the usual senescent
modernism of conventional Hungarian art galleries.
Formlessness is the new form. “Affirming that the universe
resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying
that the universe is something like a spider or spit”, wrote the
deviant librarian Georges Bataille. And Kis Róka has taken this
diabolical lesson to heart. The New Disorder shows us a true Republic
of Tumors, a dictatorship full of monstrously dilated organs, where
everyone can feel at home, while their faces are stretched beyond the
limit. It has been ten years since Kis Róka showed a historical genre
of painting stripped of history in his exhibition at the Studio Gallery
(Tettek mezeje/Field of Action, 2009), creating a “borderline Baroque”
(Márió Z. Nemes) rich in deformed, defaced, disfigured Hungarian
historical scenarios, “because we deserve such a Baroque.” Since
then the horror society of men communicating through cannibalism
has become a fixture of Kis Róka’s art. A cannibalistic relation
to history is a feature of official government cultural policy too.
Therefore the role of truly subversive art in such a context
must be to regain access to this carnivorously self-consuming
Baroque. Kis Róka’s art is dangerous, functioning in the manner
of an untried drug, corroding walls, rotting its wooden props.
For ten years now, Kis Róka’s bleeding canvases have worked in
the manner of a hidden Tourette’s syndrome, speaking a foreign
language forming post-Hungarian streams of words, wheezing
and panting, to the point of deafening us: “every word-fragment
was accompanied by sounds of squelching and gurgling as if
the creatures happened to be rinsing their rotting mouths with
menthol mouth wash. Some of the unfortunates were stuck in a
midway stage of mutation, forming mixtures of animal genes and
human intelligence. Products of a formless, unextended, Gothic
ocean of imbecility.” (Imre Bartók: A kecske éve/The Year of
the Goat) The soldier fetish is still present in a later painting,
represented by a stylized shako and a mustache (Oroszlánfarok/
Lion’s Tail, 2019), but the New Language, however inarticulate
it may appear, is at least intergalactic: they will understand it in
outer space. Kis Róka mobilizes the intensity and grandiosity of
court painters, creating a non-official Baroque tableau, in which
the portrait cannot be differentiated from the landscape, for the
maggot-infested acnes have exploded into cosmic craters and
wormholes. Goya’s uncompromising cruelty and Velázquez’s
looseness vibrates, reflecting back from the holograms of the
exhumed, while in another corner Benny Hill’s song dictates a
frighteningly fast tempo from a wrecked tape recorder: the Planet
of Meat is full of larval selves (Deleuze), unloyal to anything but
Ballard couldn’t analyze all this, in spite of his anatomical studies.
Let’s walk on the murky surface. Maybe we can find a snail or an
exoskeleton. Forget tomorrow’s weather forecast! What will the
weather of the future be like? Perhaps it’ll be alright in the end,
full of smelly acid rain, melting faces, and mutants. That sounds
like fun. Kis Róka presents us with an escatological parade of
private biology lessons, filling wormlike entities with disgusting
yet enticing contents. Bataille knew that the human is, above all, a
tube connecting a mouth and an anus. But William Burroughs goes
even further: “Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order
why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate?” This way
we could regress to the level of the invertebrates, and everything
would be alright in the end. Kis Róka takes up the Burroughsian
invitation to reinvent our anatomy: “the body is becoming the
painting itself, and the flesh is the paint.” Art involves squelching,
squashing and forming flesh, as if we were reliving a Baconian
crisis of the body: “The body is revealed only when it ceases to be
supported by the bones when the flesh ceases to cover the bones”
(Deleuze) In Geometrikus halál/Geometric Death (2019), we are
treated to a psychedelic trip in which an anonymous organicism
exacts revenge for its entrapment in bodily organizations. A clone
of one of Imre Bak’s works is decomposed by a plethora of “low
art” motives, forming a flesh stripped of any structure, a meat that
has emancipated itself of bones. The “final place of inhabitation
of rotten matter” is the formless. Kis Róka plays a monumental
puzzle game, with the important difference that these pieces are not
discrete. Rather, they melt into each other. The figurative and the
abstract are both mobilized, crushing one another in the process. In
is pure humor. Their tongues are legion because there are lots of
them – and, we may add, we cannot communicate: the metalan-
guage of the self-fertilizing forms is their all. A wink=assent, one
hundred winks=nervous breakdown. According to Timothy Leary,
“the psychedelic yoga is the toughest, most demanding yoga of
all”, and can only be accessed through laughter. The same can be
said of KRCS as a technology of consciousness-enhancement. On
a molecular level, a collectivity is being awakened, a synthetic
communion of larval selves, emplaced beneath all tongues, infected
everybody at art colleges worldwide. This is a plant that undoes
the PRIVATE. Inner and outer collapse into one plasmatic flow, like
the screaming splashes of blood giving themselves away in John
Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). At the edge of the composition, we
see a jawbone. An index finger and an eyeball must surely be here
somewhere if they haven’t already absconded. Culture is happy,
precisely because it’s bleeding all over the place.
Kis Róka’s Meduza is being shipped, and will never sink into the
boring infectious mass of pan-European contemporary art. In this
regard, the Hungarian artist has several international collaborators
doing similar work: Jakub Julian Ziółkowski, Andreas Golder,
Armen Eloyan and Albert Oehlen come to mind. Surfing in Chaos
necessitates equipping our surfboards with strong masts, but pop
art is a weak, thin canvas, barely covering the violence of decay
at work beneath. The form has become domesticated, weakened,
stripped of its subversive potential, while few realize that pus too
can be mainstream. The real mainstream is not the rule of polite-
ness, but a coalescing of surfaces and depths, waves and mirrors,
eddies and flows. Kis Róka’s art is like a tour of the unknown. Fitted
color: “The morbid authorizes a subtle perception of the way in
which life finds in death its most differentiated figure.” (Foucault)
In Kataklizma morajlása /Rumor of Cataclysm (2019), we hear a
buzzing that doesn’t want to stop, stimulating the mind to action.
In Márió Z. Nemes’ view, there is no such thing as sleep in the
Baroque, but Kis Róka is capable of creating Baroque dreams,
flowing into frozen lakes, reflecting life in the most deformed ways.
Distant clouds of gas mix with unknown flourescent substances,
contrasting with oxidized azure blotches. The national holiday of
the Tumorescent Republic is the celebration of extinction – Eu-
thanasia without exceptions, in the outer suburbs where nobody
has any form any longer, only a myriad of eyes and surveillance
cameras. The mutant artist, with who knows how many heads, and
a little brain-remnant, leaves cultural deposits behind which will
be retrospectively reanimated by a distant civilization. The Self is
becoming an assemblage of graphic signs, subjected to “schizoid
slicings”. A quarter-century ago, the Visible Human Project was
able to scan and decode the human genome: in Kis Róka’s case
“the posthuman spectral melancholy of virtuality” (Márk Horváth)
transforms into an archiving of proliferations. Nem tudsz megölni /
You Can't Kill Me (2019) – you can’t kill me, Kis Róka tells us,
because this me permeates the space of the gallery with yellow
chrome, releasing foreign matter all over the place. If the Baroque
is excess, then the grotesque is an overload of unnatural effluence.
Let’s be realistic: the anal industrial volcanoes terrorizing the face of
Mother Nature never knew any boundaries or laws. NEW DISORDER is
a CAT-scan of the present, detecting the presence of the human virus,
while the Fuckface mask is burned onto the surface of this dying

their own proliferation, feasting upon the artist’s wig, smelling
of corpses, the whole scene illuminated by a disco ball. Kis Róka
does not paint the Planet of Meat after any models, it is not a
work of representation so much as disappearance. The artist too
dissolves in this fleshly ecology. Figures excrete themselves into
their own matter, traveling through the strata, made of oil pastel
with a touch of water, a media of hybridity, bridging the voids
with formless blotches. The watery paint displays a liquidity which
displays the subconscious flows of Mother Nature, subjecting her
creations sadistically to Rorschach-tests for her own amusement.
A true thing survives evolution, while the artist is doomed to
repeat this chaotic act of creation in a reduced manner, through
oil paint locked in tubes. As an artist, you can’t just spill yourself
in every direction.
Mum and Dad just shitted on the Neo Geo again! – screams
a frivolous voice distorted by Helium from a loudspeaker at the
carnival. Hard-edge painting survives evolutionary selection, and
can, therefore, be burdened with ever more images, until Budapest
Horror is born, forming the artistically passive offensive of the
Soft Ones. Kis Róka’s empire of flesh and blood is also a bodiless
hyperspace, but not in a science-fictional sense, for science too,
along with religion, is dead, and the laws of mathematics and
logic aren’t working either. Euclid’s orifices have been violated
by worms, breeding inside the body of geometry, but forms are
still there, in the form of a deformed, depraved smile. Even J. G.
35
Prenatális ellenállás/Prenatal Resistance (2019), form degenerates with fluorescent rubber wipers, we are transported into an orgy of Planet of Flesh. “Coronavirus” is another word for “carnivorous.”
into a fleshy, fatty, white emptiness, a meditative silence perforated
by necrotic sausages, cut up into juicy post-phallic pieces, while we
wince with pain: our dick that’s being sliced open by this painting
and queerly, we’re enjoying it!
NEW DISORDER is a storm of pigments, a hallucinogenic graffiti-art,
which will come to be recognized as mythical by cave-dwellers of
the future (XXX, 2019), but the KRCS-trip is not a lonely voyage for
the rugged individual. The Dirty Old Ones are inhuman explorers,
burning portraits of themselves into the minds of harrowed devotees,
spreading their seed, like ostomists of the Interzone, slicing off
superfluous pieces of meat, licking wounds, surviving, adapting,
growing mutations. “I made the paintings in my own image, and I
was able to make them grow, reproduce because they’re going to
inherit the planet from us” – says Kis Róka. Our own representations
are no exception to what we may call the rule of promiscuity. The
imperative is simple: fuck everything, even that which doesn’t hap-
pen to be moving. Soon, it will be, as we squirm together in a fit of
exhaustion with the Nameless. “Once you’ve fucked yourself, you
can do it again. One day, you’re never going to be fucked again”,
the artist explains. Even the creator cannot know where the act
of creation begins and ends. Just the right amount of mimesis is
manufactured and released into the promiscuous exchange, where
genes party together. ID photos and unidentified selfies mix with
self-fertilized embryos laughing at the viewer. Parthenogenesis

Cataclysm with Laughing Gas

 The Swine Wizard
The cold lean against chimneys. Old loam houses crackle as black soot carried by the
wind dashes against them. The pig slaughter finally begins as a young girl drags a fat
swine into the courtyard. Her long, dark hair is tied around the animal’s thick neck like
a rope. The girl’s head bends back and her windpipe accordions out as she leads the pig.
Stubby men arrive and knives glint in their fingers as they stab between the bristly hairs.
The swine pukes black liquid onto the snow. It’s sharp screech circles above the courtyard
for some time, then a bird catches it in midair and flies away.
“That's right, keep torturing it, and it will give out its secrets!” The girl claps her hands
joyfully as the words steam around her white face. “Who cares if it screams! We’ll paint
the courtyard black. The head... I’m sure it's full of tasty black pitch, gluey titbits of the
future! But be careful with your damn blades! Don't touch my beautiful hair!”
Basin-holding women squirm in the distance. The blood-puddles freeze. Children
arrive and begin to slide on them cheerfully. Later, their shoes will leave red footprints in
the snow and in the kitchen. The smell of scorched skin tramples on their noses. Entrails
in vases – vapor-ghosts flying out of them, rising into the sky.
“Blood makes my hair so shiny,” admits the girl. At the end of her hair lies the scraped
pig, whose four pink legs point in different directions. “Maybe if I lighten my hair a
bit more, a halo will grow around my head. And the prettiest thoughts, like a cluster of
grapes, will hang down from it. I can almost see it ... Boys will arrive, circling around
me like hungry starlings, picking and tasting them. Oh, such greedy little rascals! What
wines we will drink!”
Bloody snails, the innards of the dead pig, crawl over the courtyard. They are trying
to escape. Men run after them, impaling them with pitchforks just before they wriggle
out between the fence boards.
The villagers lead an old woman wrapped in a filthy blanket from her house. A giant
hammer hangs from her thin shaking hand. The woman hands the tool to a man and
watches as he knocks out the dead pig’s teeth. The man shows the bloody teeth to the
old witch, who takes them into her palm, shaking them as if they were dice. She drops
them onto the snow and begins to read the terrible prophecy.
by Zoltán Komor The Swine Wizard
“Villagers! Your bodily auras will burn off this year” She spits out the words. “The
trees will produce railway carriages and unkindly guests will arrive to tread on the tender
faces of your rooms with their ugly boots. Giant pines! From now on, your needles will
grow inside your trunks! Birds on tree branches! Your colorful feathers will fall out!
People! Hear my words! There will be no spring this year!”
The bilious attack somersaults – the pálinka bottles explode and pieces of glass injure
the children’s faces. Dark hair grows from these wounds. The villagers grab each other’s
crusty hands and begin to cry: “Truss the saws! Mix some sawdust into the sausage! Pour
hot water onto the snow, and chain the rising ghosts, so you can dry them in your attic!
If their limbs fall out, we can have a feast! Cook the thermometers, slice the icicles, we
don't want any more winter!”
Anger blocks their words, so they begin to prod the dead animal with their knives.
The girl, her long hair still tied around the pig's neck, begins to scream: “Stop, you fools!
My hair! You are cutting my beautiful tresses!” Dark clumps of hair swirl in the air. The
cold wind picks them up and they fly, tiny spider legs clumping together until they turn
into black crows. The echo of their cawing is like skeleton fingers pointing at Heaven.
The old witch turns her hunchback on the lunatic assemblage. She opens her dry lips
and begins to put the swine teeth into her mouth. Then she gets on all fours, and trots
up and down in the snow, grunting wildly. Someone yells: “It happened again! The pig
didn't die! The soul just moved into that cursed witch! Catch her! The wizard is escaping,
with untold prophecies in her filthy mouth!”
37
The swinewoman tries to get around the men, dodging back and forth in front of their
knives, then slips between her attackers’ legs. Suddenly, the bald girl blocks her way.
The pig stops and looks up at the girl, who says “I have no more hair to lasso you with.
Not anymore. But my baldness excites me.” She looks at the villagers and then back at
the animal.
“Wicked sinners, that's what they are! Born with penknives under their fingernails.
You don't want to shake hands with them, believe me! Of course, you know more about
them than I do, you poor thing.”
The swine looks at the crying girl with warm eyes.
“Free me, please, so I can have a glimpse of the future!” the girl begs. “Take me on
your back, so we can leave these starless courtyards, where they put rocks in our shoes,
where they throw salt into our eyes. Silly villagers, they believe the soul can melt! Ah!
Take me away, dear wizard! Take me anywhere!”
The pig lowers its head so the girl can mount its back. They run away, far from the
courtyard, where innards skate on red ice, where old superstitions rot the meat, where they
cook crystal balls in a huge caldron. Where the villagers spear dogs with their mustaches.
The hairy legs of the dying animals' jerk and their small claws scratch indecipherable
marks onto the air. A bald girl riding a pig over a snowy field–bristles tickling her thighs
– as her laughter paints a shining yellow halo around her head.
“I thought I was your keeper, but now I know, I was the captive all along. My hair was
the chain, and it is gone for good!” she yells happily. “From now on, nothing's going to
pull my head back!” Wine oozes from her halo. It's just like blood, but the taste is heavenly
sweet. Above, noisy crows with unrelenting beaks peck at clouds that smell like meat.
 To the Phantasmians
by Chazár Keresztély
no bullshit
II.7.
Our stunned eyes, dilated pupils filled with images, can see their own future even in the
most nondescript of gardens: once the wild vegetation takes over, in other words, once
desertification sets in, or the glaciers of the next Ice Age, the future will be extinguished.
Such visions are disenchanting to say the least, though we know that they are nothing
more than extrapolations of the present; the seriousness of our prospects can only be
alleviated with some irony. Like the monotony of an escalator, everyday life drones on,
III.1.
unaware of what lies in store. Functions display an everpresent ubiquous movement
39
that shows the way forward: up! up! higher! Those who look backwards can easily lose
their balance, or become salt statues, falling victim to the bad luck of happenstance.
  Modern teleological myths always view the future from below: this is why they
strive upwards: the moderns were always developing, building elevators, erecting
frameworks. To be modern means to construct skyscrapers, like so many rebellious
battlements against time. Modernist spaces are full of plans, pathways and hopeful
objects. The future promised by utopia nonetheless proved unfruitful: it is always
evaporating, deferring itself into a Beyond outside of temporality. Only shells are left:
shells of time, ruins of aeons.
Our minds have gotten used to digesting the remnants of planning, concluding and
developing, all the while seeing through everything, transcending the past through the
present into a fuzzy, uncertain future. The unspeakable past and the future-never-to-
come, or even the infinitely folded present.
V.7.
Dialectical dadaism ceaselessly deconstructs itself, gnawing upon both time and style,
chewing on the Snake of Time, rebelling against the flow. The tyranny of triadic time is
subverted by clever subterfuge, thanks to which the past becomes just as malleable as it
is fatalistic. The future has been diagnosed, and already it is aestheticized, dressed up
in misleading camouflage freckles. The past-in-becoming, these miscellaneous efforts
coming up behind us, striving towards the future, are far different from the nostalgic
necrophiliac stupor that holds our land ransom. We do not want to betrothe dead forms
and corpselike contents; rather, we seek a new creation, one that shall attain an antiq-
uity far superior to anything seen before. You must become ancient in order to be new
again. We want nothing to do with a corpulent, historical consciousness, an historical
memory supported by cement constructs: we represent the free play of spirit. HUF
spreads perverse toys, misleading objects, and intense joys, making muck of any trace,
rendering our tracks untraceable. Time is penetrated by our citation-marks, rendering
every historical event retroactively ironic, relativizing all meanings and phenomena. We
show the archaeologists and cybersurfers alike the door. HUF is cultivating an ancient
garden, spreading its seed upon ground made fertile by a bull’s shit.
by Mátyás Sirokai
Us who put our faith in the void and worship space shall return into
his love in the end, wherever we may roam. He is the father to the
mind that gazes inwardly, suspended in eternal darkness, spawning
the illusion of myriad patterns and setting the swarm of celestial
bodies ablaze to serve as the stingers of its own glory, holding
us forever mesmerized. Bulging from the surface, we crave and
devour space, just like its vast clusters of matter tumble into each
other in mighty cycles. We turn our face towards the unexplained
pulsars that drift beyond the husk of familiar constellations. Driv-
en by celestial visions, we prowl the immortal night, fellows of
distant, whirling saints, dreamers of the beginning and the end,
and eternity shall be our deliverance.
Us who were drawn onto this planet have given up chronology,
forgetting what had been, not caring what is to come. Time was
gone; only a spiraling wilderness of sprawling monasteries and
rippling corridors remained, spewing forth a medley of alien sac-
raments. There was a murmur coming from the inner chambers,
the words of an otherworldly speech, churning our viscera to the
rhythm of the pulsating walls. 
Time was gone and gone was human language too. We de-
scended into the ear canal and the planet created our replicas,
who came along when we emerged through the mouth. The planet
taught us like a mother teaches a child. At first, she regurgitated
our defective body and then she started playing with us, inflaming
the urge for transformation and working with us on the humanoid,
organic cathedrals which are oblivious of time and preach the
perfect language to the beasts of space.
The muscles that serve to pump darkness into the body we know
as the void, for lack of a better term, shall tremble when the
creases of space start to fold back into the epicenter. As the shades
withdraw, the imprints shall become more visible, left behind by
both the younglings, elemental particles of love, and us who are
lost in the earthly light.
The imprints caught between the folding creases shall cluster
as the cephalopod of the matter, proliferating around the insatiable
hunger for space, grows thicker and thicker tentacles. When the
head retracts its tentacles into a single tenebrous locus, around
which nothing but the memory and the anticipation of planets shall
revolve, then all imprints shall merge into a singular craving; and
this craving shall beget the boom.

Neck Deep in Shit–János Vajda’s Sausage Dream
by Zsigmond Kompolthy
In 1933, on the 60th birthday of the great Hungarian psychoanalyst
Sándor Ferenczi, an intriguing book was published, entitled Psycho-
analytical Studies. The introduction was written by Freud himself,
and in the anthology various Hungarian Freudians wrote chapters,
authors such as Géza Róheim, Imre Hermann and Alice Bálint. Among
them was the decadent poet (known for his aesthetic eroticism),
Géza Szilágyi, who contributed the essay János Vajda’s Hell. The
theme of this bizarre work is the sexual life of the Hungarian poet
Vajda János (1827–1897). Szilágyi’s goal is to uncover the “great
dream” that gives the psychological key to Vajda’s motivations and
pathology. When asked about his dream by contemporaries Árpád
Zempléni and Lajos Mikes, Vajda responded: “Imagine, I was sitting
neck deep in human excrement, which grew so immensely that it
reached my mouth. In this terrible condition I felt as if an invisible
hand reached down from above and inserted a frankfurter sausage
into my helpless mouth, and the owner of this hand declared: Eat
it! So you ask how am I? Well, this is my present state.” This is
as much as the friends were willing to admit, while Szilágyi adds
that, as the years went by, the dream was modified: “occasionally,
the human excrement collided in waves above his head, sometimes
the invisible hand would aggressively insert the sausage into the
dreaming poet’s mouth, who unknowingly bit on it.”
There can be no doubt about it that the amateur psychoanalyst
Szilágyi thought he had discovered the manifestation of a symptom
of infantile anal sexuality. From a psychoanalytical perspective, this
stands to reason. But from the inner perspective of Hungarofutur-
ism, another interpretation can be brought to light. The sausage is
Trianon. How could this possibly be?!
Let us elaborate.
41
The poet is sitting neck deep in shit, and this ocean, this liquid
Hungarian thalassic regression is his own state. This flow is none
other than Hungarian life as such, embracing the poet, not letting
him go. From this deep consciousness only Trianon can save us,
providing sustenance to the Hungarosaur. The frankfurter must be
stuffed down its throat. And if all goes well, the Hungarosaur will
do this of its own accord... And whose hand is this? We can see
the ancient Hungarian God of War, Hadúr, behind the arm. And of
course, there is Vienna; the Vienna where Baron Eszterházy took
Gina, the woman he stole; and the traitorous, evil Vienna, object
of Vajda’s post-1848 hatred, the schwarz-gelb Wien. And Vienna
connects with Frankfurt, symbolized by the frankfurter sausage,
for we know that this food was invented by a citizen of Frankfurt,
a Johann Georg Lahner, around 1805. Szilágyi finds another case,
from Vajda’s wife, Róza Bartos. In her autobiographic fragments,
published in the Nyugat journal, she writes of Vajda’s strange fet-
ish: “he was enamored with excrement, he collected it, observed
it, sometimes straight after defecation, other times preserving
it.” Róza, or Rozamunda, writes that Vajda “kept excrement on a
plate and examined it with a microscope.” These pieces of shit are
remnants of the shitsea Vajda saw in his dreams. It is a product
of the Hungarosaur, as well as the Hungarian Exodus. And it is
not a foregone conclusion that the digestion of the frankfurter had
something to do with all this, that the sea of shit is a product of
eating the sausage. When eating the sausage, the poet is eating a
piece of himself, stuffing his own remains into his belly. And when
extracting himself from his own bowels, after defecation, he is
searching for his dirty identity on the polluted plate. Thus, dream and
reality coincide remarkably. Vajda’s fetish
is the prequel to becoming Posthungarian.
It is no accident that Vajda – decades prior
to Trianon – was already dreaming of the
Posthungarian Condition. And even in his
final days, Vajda dreamed of his sausage.
In the first point of his will, composed on
the 16th of January, 1897, we read the fol-
lowing: “My body must be dissected into
ever smaller pieces: my brain, heart and
stomach should be taken out of my body
and minced.” This is as excellent method
as any for preparing a human sausage. The
desire for becoming mincemeat combines
with a scream of masochistic enjoyment.
Masochism is the collective secret of the
Hungarian unconscious: we would love to
disappear and go extinct! Just read György
Petri’s poem, Song of a Pig! I repeat, the
dream-sausage is Trianon. We, Hungarofu-
turists, self-aware exile Hungarians, don’t
want to swallow the sausage, we don’t want
anything to do with it, we shall not partake
of this meal. We, Hungarian exiles, swear
to fill the sausage once again, on the day
of reckoning when Hungarian flesh will be
served on the finest of feasts. HUF ignores, even
ridicules, limp, disgusting pre-posthungarian
accidental sausages. Let’s not fill ourselves
with our own bowels! Posthungarians cease
to fill themselves at all, because they do not
have bodies. We reject Ludwig Feuerbach’s
assertion: Der Mensch ist, was er isst. Ac-
cording to our belief, the Hungarofuturists
are not what they eat. In other words: the
dream-Hungarian posthuman is not what the
powers that be want them to eat. We are so
much more than our sausages.
 The Last Hussar
Requiem for the Austro-Hungarian Space Program 2367 A.D.
This is the last transmission of the Austro-Hungarian Space Sta-
tion Auferstehung Zwei, anno Domini 2367. I am looking at Planet
Earth from the observation deck; more precisely I am looking at
the hole which used to be my beloved homeland. The immense,
black area of death and desolation which is now known as the
Carpathian Crater once held snow-capped mountains and fertile
lands of boundless beauty; but it is no more. I’m speaking in a
foreign language now because I have reasons to believe that no
one else has survived in the Solar System any more who would
speak Hungarian, this sweetest and strangest of all tongues.
Our mission, ambitiously named the Austro-Hungarian Space
Program, was the last desperate attempt and our only hope for
saving our nation through reconciliation and peace; but now, it
is all too clear that we have failed. We were too late and by the
time our endeavors finally bore fruit in the confines of the celestial
laboratory of our station, the different factions of the Hungarians
back home had already succeeded in their century-long project
of complete and mutual annihilation.
The Heir-Presumptive, for whom we have sacrificed decades
of research, faith and dedication, has no realm to reign upon.
Our plan was based on the doctrine that the ways of the passion-
ate Hungarian heart cannot be kept at bay without the civilizing
antidote of Austrian refinement. The history of the Hungarian
nation’s last few hundred years that followed the separation of
the realms provide more than enough proof to this. So as long as
the old glory of the Dual Monarchy is not restored, the Hungarian
race is destined to be consumed by the ebbs and flows of its own
burning emotion.
We were the reptilian complex in the brain of the Empire,
responsible for instinctual behaviors involved in aggression,
dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays.
In a matter of days, we, who were working on the Austro-Hungarian
Space Station Auferstehung Zwei with our Austrian colleagues, became
the only Hungarians left in the whole Universe. Although we had at
by Mátyás Dunajcsik
our disposal the complete database of a millennium of Hungarian
It is obvious that without our contribution, the Austrians have cultural heritage safely uploaded into the Heir-Presumptive’s biome-
become a feeble lot of yodeling wimps no longer wanting to be
the leader of nations in Europe and in the world. But left to our chanical hard drive, there was not a single soul left on Planet Earth
own devices and cut off from the soothing severity of Viennese
bureaucracy, we have also degenerated into a nation of brutes and who could make any sense of it anymore.
tyrants who have lost sight of all the high ideals which once made
our holy union the crown jewel of the Continent. We have tried to keep the catastrophe a secret from the Heir-Pre-
But that which was torn apart on the ground could be united once
more in the skies; that was our premise, our dream, our common sumptive, but our efforts were in vain: he was too smart, too advanced
goal. We have gathered in secret the best brains of the monarchy,
Hungarians and Austrians alike, emigré scientists from the world’s in his intellectual and technological capacities to be kept in the dark
best universities across the globe and home-grown geniuses who
were ignored and ridiculed by their compatriots, and delivered like a fragile child in a faraway sanctuary. And when he realized
them in orbit to our conspiratorial space station to conceive the
Heir-Presumptive who, not long after the 500th anniversary of that the sole reason for his being, the dream of a new dual monarchy
the great Austro-Hungarian Compromise would descend from the
Heavens in a second coming, and bring redemption to the weary under his reign was no longer possible, he started to run amok in the
nations of the Carpathians.
We have exhumed the bones of the greatest leaders of our corridors of the research facility, swearing and screaming in all the
43
common past, the earthly remains of Franz Joesph I of Austria
and the relics of King Saint Stephen I of Hungary, to graft together languages of his lost empire.
their genetic material into the base of the perfect monarch of the
future, cybernetically enhanced and merged with a supercomputer Then, after a few hours of quiet and desperate deliberation, having
containing all the knowledge of Austro-Hungarian history, poetry
and science accumulated throughout the centuries. concluded that his destiny was now to finish what his subjects-to-be
He began to speak and utter his first words at the exact moment
when five hundred years earlier, the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen had started, he began to hunt down the space station’s personnel one
was placed on the head of Franz Josef I and the two nations were
united under one ruler. With his first utterance, he also confirmed by one, with no regard to national identity or ethnic origins. His final
one of the most controversial theories on the origin of the Hun-
garians, since the language he spoke first was none other than the verdict echoed throughout the pressurized chambers of the facility:
language of the star system Sirius, the native land of the Hungarian
race according to many visionaries and cryptohistorians of the past. Ha nem lehetek az élet császára, leszek inkább Isten kegyelméből
Too bad that the moment of reckoning for the new Heir-Pre-
sumptive coincided with the exact moment when the two leading a halálé.
factions of the Hungarians engaged their own masterplans.
On one hand, the Emigrant Government of the global diaspora Now I am the only space hussar left of the original Hungarian con-
in the cadre of the National Salvation Initiative dropped a set of
highly destructive hydrogen bombs in the heart of the homeland’s tingent who is still alive, locked up in an isolation chamber of the
capital and other major cities to ensure a tabula rasa on which a
new Hungary could be established by the homecoming elite; but medical ward. But I hear the steps of the Heir-Presumptive coming
not before the standing regime’s Hungarian Self-Preservation Pro-
gram was successfully launched, which consisted of a genetically closer and closer, and my only regret is that my last dying words will
engineered and highly selective lethal virus designed to eliminate
anyone outside the Hungarian borders who had the faintest knowl- only be understood by my murderer.
edge of the Hungarian tongue, in order to crush the international
resistance movement of their emigré compatriots. Isten óvja a Királyt, hajrá Magyarország, hajrá magyarok!
 Hungarofuturist Productions of Hauntology
by Márió Z. Nemes
„As long as there
are Hungarians,
I shall be reborn!”
– Szabó Dezső
In The Location Of Culture, postcolonialist theoretician Homi
Bhabha notes that contemporary cultural realignments can
be conceptualized in a spatial poetics. Culture cannot be
localized anywhere except what Bhabha calls the “beyond”.
The production of cultural identities has escaped restriction
to discrete systems of homogeneous narratives, but this does
not automatically entail the revelation of any new utopian
horizon and/or the total elimination or disqualification of
the past. Beyondness is a self-contradictory locality, which
separates itself from the landscape, inasmuch as geocultural
mapping is always already occupied by ideologically moti-
vated logistics of power. The “scape” no longer necessarily
correlates with a “land.” Rather, the scape has been radically
extracted from closed systems of registration, verification and
enumerations. This transcendence is its own object, the move
of extension radiating outside, whose borders are synonymous
with its own reproduction, allowing an opening which indi-
vidualizes the subject through infinite division. If we want
to salvage anything from the colonizing regimes of identity
whose fragments dot the cultural landscape, a question itself
fraught with political uncertainties, then we are compelled to
inhabit the space of the in-between, where disorientation and
a permanent fort/da game seem to become the primary modes
of articulation. This dislocation generates certain productive
energies to which we must be attentive.
All this necessitates a dislocation of historical time, an
uchronic perspective if you will, a private chronology that
resists the imperialistic realm of officially sanctioned public
„The future can
only be for ghosts.
And the past.”
– Jacques Derrida
45
memory. At the same time, there is a temporal dualism at work
here, an interplay between a singular Universal Time and the
myriad private times that cannot be reduced to a merely dia-
lectical confrontation. If we are to avoid solidification into a
binary of center and periphery, then the logic of power itself
has to be radicalized, played against itself. In a word, ironic
strategies are needed. On the periphery, in this case, defined as
the subject as sub-system embedded within the broader social
contexture, time passes differently, and the center knows this.
That is why we see power always trying to implement temporal
simultaneity, everywhere regulating and monopolizing time.
The modern expansion of power coincides with what George
Woodcock called “the tyranny of the clock”, the dominance
of mechanical time at the expense of living time experience.
Simultaneity is a technology of power. The dualistic differ-
entiation of time does not create a time of differences, for
Peripheral Time is produced synchronously with the Time of
Empire, integrating the heterogeneous into the homogeneous
in a passive, subordinate state. Provincial small time is the
slave of singularized History, spelled with capital letters.
Provincialism is self-colonization, for its supposed exteriority
to the Global is an illusion, always marked by its antagonistic
relation to the Time of Empire. A truly heterogeneous private
time must, therefore, be something more than a mere negation
of synchronicity.
According to Bhabha desynchronized temporalities can
be brought into play in a “third” space, produced through
the hybridization of colonizing and colonialized times. The
conqueror is taken over in turn by the conquered. In other
words, the time of the end must be introduced back into the
imperial center, messing up prognoses. This way we cannot
know when the barbarians will be reaching the gates, or even
from which direction. Indeed, the very idea of “gates” and
“barbarians” seems ever less pertinent to our contemporary
social reality. “Synchronous presences” decomposing both
the crisis discourses and progress narratives of European mo-
dernity. As Michel Foucault says in his biopolitics seminar of
1979, the entire liberal project is inseparable from the idea of
a specifically “European progress”, underwriting a neocolonial
regime of “global calculation.” (Michel Foucault: The Birth of
Biopolitics, 54) The condition of the hybridity “beyond” mo-
dernity is a type of post-didactic state, in which learning from
history becomes just as impossible as forecasting the future.
Neither the “beginning” nor the “end” is free of ambiguity,
for this creative amnesia slices up the flow of time. Like every
revisionism, its anachronism is directed at the achievement of
a productive uchronia. Against nostalgia or acceptance of the
contemporary, anachronism introduces a radical outsideness
in the name of a different present.
The political aesthetics of Hungarofuturism (HUF) is based on
affirming the beyond. This cultural-artistic movement attempts
to rethink Hungarian national identity freed of self-colonizing
nationalist narratives. Similarly to Afrofuturism, it forms a
poetic experiment in radical imagination, through which an
emergent minority identity can feed into a strategy of post-ironic
overidentification. As opposed to the hegemonic discourse of
“Hungarian consciousness”, it represents an alternative way of
being Hungarian, through discovering “post-Hungarianness.”
The key to the Hungarofuturist transition to the post-Hun-
garian state can be found in the metaphor of metamorphosis,
or becoming-alien. In this xenoaesthetic transmogrification,
national identity is confronted with its original alienness;
self-identity rots into the third space, inhabited by mutant
Hungarofuturists, while during the process of seeking after
singularities all geopolitical and humanistic ideologies are
deconstructed too. It is not a case of decomposing the nation
so as to reconstruct it at a greater level of generality. HUF
stands opposed to the power logistics of both particularization
and generalization. The nation is blasted into space, loosen-
ing Hungarian time, while historiography translates into an
imaginative practice. All this generates a desynchronization
of time and space, opening the Hungarian landscape to weird
causalities – the fictional past and an even more fictional future
coalesce in the third space of commonality.
Anachronism as a practice is the method of the post-Hungar-
ians. “The ‘post-Hungarian’ is far from new. The ‘post-Hun-
garian’ is actually radically un-new. The ‘post-Hungarian’
works through conferring antiquity, going beyond mere re-
construction (...) while never forgetting that this aesthetic
construct uses old, even archaic elements. This is the history of
self-redefinitions. It is not so much a thing or the characteristic
of a thing, but rather an act, or the logic of a particular type
 Hungarofuturist Productions of Hauntology
of action.” More than mere escapism, HUF is not a rejection of
the landscape, but the reconfiguration of Hungarian culture
within the framework of the old, building with chunks of a
history that was always constructed. This specific constellation
differentiates Hungarofuturism from previous incarnations
of Futurism. As distinct from the latter, with its militantly
modernist emphasis on the radically new, the post-Hungarian
viewpoint is distinguished by a post-ironic affirmation of its
own “non-new” state. This necessarily entails an ironic relation
to the supposed, metaphysically grounded “newness” of the old
avant-garde. Instead of eliminating the old and jumping for-
ward to some kind of future utopia, HUF tries to create a time-
space loop, warping history. Against revolutionary newness
and passéism, HUF operates a type of spectral retrofuturism, a
returning which is not quite a repetition, a strange recombi-
nant recoded aesthetic timewarp which is also a timeswamp,
complicating the deceptive simplicity of the Hungarian plains.
Escape into and return from space, like Paul Langevin’s
errant space-traveler, shot up like a cannonball into the distant
emptiness, the sum of these two gestures bends spacetime,
reintegrating us into novelty while distancing history from this
world. The post-Hungarian explores strange landscapes at the
intersection of Earth and Space, interpreting and practicing
a xenopolitics of the Outside, like an alien, whose actions
can be summarized in entirely profane terms. When it comes
to UFOs, there is no need to mobilize religion or spiritual-
ity, because metaphysics distances us from the astrophysical
Other. The intervention into terrestrial life by paleonauts
breeds intimacy upon the surface of this planet, bringing the
presence of the Other into frightening, but also reassuring,
proximity. HUF envisions a phantom historiography, in which
a Derridean “spectropoetics” (spectropoétique) is related to
the retrospective post-Hungarian “visitation” or haunting of
Hungarianness: “Visit upon visit, since it returns to see us
and since visitare, frequentative of visere (to see, examine,
contemplate), translates well the recurrence or returning, the
frequency of a visitation. The latter does not always mark the
moment of a generous apparition or a friendly vision; it can
signify strict inspection or violent search, consequent persecu-
tion, implacable concatenation. The social mode of haunting,
its original style could also be called, taking into account
this repetition, frequentation.” (Jacques Derrida: Specters of
Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York and London:
Routledge, 1994, 126.)
Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology plays a tremendous
role in the conceptualization of a Hungarofuturist temporal
politics. Expressions such as “visitation”, “hijacking”, “ab-
duction” play a key role in post-Hungarian discourses. The
post-Hungarian is resolutely postmodern, or post-postmodern,
in the sense that he/she/they/it has no essence. Neither does
Hungarianness (whatever that means!) have a being that is
separate from post-Hungarians. The “homeland” itself is a
site for the production of ghosts. Derrida’s philosophy of his-
tory builds on a deconstructionist reading of a sentence from
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.”
This phrase, time out of joint, becomes a mechanism for the
summoning of a variety of spirits and ghosts, introducing a
dislocation that cannot be violently reintegrated or recomposed.
Inside this opening, a fort/da game played by phantoms comes
to be elaborated. But what exactly is this time out of joint? It
has been fragmented by haunting frequentation, dislocated,
disrupted, disjointed: a temporality at once crazy and chaotic.
Time is the slicing up of history and world, an exteriority
where time lies outside itself, composing a deformed, inco-
herent, almost Dadaist present. Every once in a while, the line
between composition and decomposition is blurred. In many
ways Hungarofuturism operates similarly to the parasitical
Cordyceps ignota fungus, which invades the bodies of tarantula
spiders. After a certain period of time, fungal growths burst
forth from inside the dead spider, turning tarantulas into art.
The relation of Hungarofuturism to Hungarian history is anal-
ogous to the relationship of the fungi to the body of its host.
Infiltrating nationalist narratives, HUF proceeds to inhabit the
body of mainstream Hungarian historiography, growing until
the time is right to emerge, spreading its spores. Something
47
stranger than the original is created, while preserving the shell
of the previous cultural form intact, in a petrified present. Of
course, the Cordyceps as nonhuman artist proves fatal to its
host, in this sense being more “futurist” than HUF. The Hunga-
rofuturist is more about symbiosis than parasitism, but neither
does he/she/they/it reject that alternative entirely.
With Derrida we must ask, “what happens when time itself
gets ‘out of joint’, dis-jointed, disadjusted, disharmonic, dis-
corded, or unjust? Ana-chronique?” (Jacques Derrida: Specters
of Marx, 25.) The productive anachronism of hauntings is a
dissection or desiccation of the present within presence, the
non-simultaneity of the present within the now. In other words,
we may speak here about the emergence of a phantom tem-
porality. Hungarofuturists visit their conventional Hungarian
brethren, returning from a trip to outer space. This return is
more than a repetition of the past, being the return of something
different, colder, in a word, reptilian. When it comes to talking
about time, the separation between “before” and “after” is
misleading, because it replaces circularity with an artificially
construed linearity. After Einsteinian relativity, there is no
such thing as a privileged position of observation, and this
can be applied to historical narrativity as well. Priority and
posteriority lose their dominance, allowing for a cutting up of
historical construction. We must also see that the disturbance
of history is not just a provocatively puerile reaction to rival
narrations. The “truth” of History or its “justice” is punctuated
by real historical traumas. Cut-up as logic can be viewed as
both a symptom of trauma (the non-simultaneity of the nation
with itself), but is also capable of functioning as an opening for
 new traumas, broken eschatologies and crazy excesses. Maybe
we do not need a spaceship for time travel. Perhaps all that is
required is putting a bullet in the clock or smashing the screen.
“If there is something a thing as ‘national consciousness’,
then I believe there must be something like a ‘national uncon-
scious’, and this interests me significantly more than national
self-representations. It shows that there is no such thing as
an unproblematically ’national’ representation or a ‘national
machine’ of identity that works even if you do not want it to.
The national unconscious overdetermines national awareness.
You think you are in control, but too late you realize, no, it
is controlling you. The national unconscious is a symbolic
place where, if we want, we can uncover the traces of collec-
tive traumas, as well as repressions (...) In the beginning was
the trauma, the wound, the discontinuity, and there were no
nations, generations or genealogies. The original lies beyond
any chronological beginning: it is at once primordial and
everpresent, anachronistic. The organic national body and the
organically growing national history is a nation-machine, a
prosthetic rhetoric, prosthetic logic, prosthetic politics and
prosthetic legal normativity, which is attempting to fill a gap of
signification preceding it.” (András Borbély: tisztátalan / tisz-
tátalan / tisztátalan nemzetGép, in: http://aszem.info/2017/05/
tisztatalan-tisztatalan-tisztatalan-nemzetgep1/) András
Borbély’s diagnosis suggests that the machinic operativity
of the national unconscious, which at once fills the “hole”
and constructs the rhetoric of the nation as machine, is what
animates the national consciousness from underneath, us-
49
ing the latter as a body uses its organs or prostheses. The
organic national body and organically conceived national
history would then be the tools of a nation-machine, whose
own traumas provide it with an endogenous source of en-
ergy. No need to eat other animals when we can consume
ourselves. Autophagy is the energetic regime which best cor-
responds to the self-referential mode of social organization.
This phantomlike visitation by Hungarofuturism can be
likened to a dislocation, exposing as it does the organic, the
sovereign and the linear as badly connected prostheses. We
disassemble the nation-machine, exploiting chinks in its ar-
mor, reprogramming it for new goals, setting it going in new
directions, all in the context of post-Hungarian spatial tactics.
Anachronism is applied Ludditism, an ambiguous practice like
the Nietzschean philosophizing with a hammer. In Nietzsche’s
case, it is not just a case of smashing the old idols with a
hammer. Viewing the hammer exclusively negatively would
be a repetition of the merely atheist existentialist antinomism
applied to idols. “The absurd man (...) silences all the idols”
with mocking laughter, writes Albert Camus. (Albert Camus:
The Myth of Sisyphus, London: Hamish & Hamilton, 1971, 98.)
Hungarofuturism is more Nietzschean than Camus, more post-
modern than absurdist, because while mockery is not absent
from Hungarofuturist aesthetics, it also utilizes a post-ironic
overidentification. Philosophizing with a hammer involves a
creative destruction. It is not a case of destroying the nation
as vehicle, but rather hijacking it for our own purposes. The
machine’s operations must be explored, mapped, tested, con-
trolled, cared for, excessively, for its ideological energetics
has the keys to the technology of power. Differently put, the
imperial authority of officially accepted National Time is built
on a colonization of the national unconscious. Hungarofutur-
ism comes “knocking”, like a Poltergeist, addressing queries
to the conscious and proto-conscious elements of the national
identity, spreading its haunting until the machine is immobi-
lized under the pressure of its own contradictions. To achieve
this, we must learn to love the machine, the Great National
Technology. Tactics of dispersion and confusion necessitate a
deeply emotional attachment. A Hungarofuturist patriotism?
Yes, this is entirely possible and can be defined as an irritation
of the nation-machine with an eroticism of the hammer.
Anachronicity is an invitation, an exciting opportunity to
occupy a new time-space continuum. This occupation does not
progress along the lines of a regular army’s imperial strategies.
It bears a greater resemblance to the episodic, spasmodic har-
assment of guerrillas, demons and ghosts, attaching themselves
to those they attack. The Hungarofuturist strategy stalks its
prey, irritating the national prosthesis, then attaching itself to
the enemy, irritating the ideological codes until overidentifi-
cation is achieved. Regular armed forces work from a position
of sovereignty, occupying enemy territory, with the goal of
absorbing rival countries into the national body or at least
neutralizing their foes. The irregular Hungarofuturists lack
any “position” they can call their own, for the phantomlike
time-space loops they inhabit, have gained their energies from
the collapse of the center. The ghost, similarly to the partisan,
is “outside” (in the night, the forest, the hills), but this exte-
riority is always threatening to encroach upon the domain of
power, declaring its presence in the most unexpected of places.
Outsideness is always already inside. The post-Hungarian,
following closely upon the trail of the Hungarian, is not an
exterior excess, nor a mere parody or mockery, but a minority
who uses the rhetoric of the machine differently. He/she/they/
it knows this language from the outside, speaking it strangely,
even, one could argue, better than the “majority”, for the
minority can overidentify in ways the majority cannot.
The phantom tactics of overidentification have been analyz-
ed in a highly pertinent manner by Slavoj Žižek in an essay on
the Slovenian band Laibach and the IRWIN art group connected
to it. Laibach and IRWIN mobilize a political aesthetics contain-
ing elements extracted from Stalinism, National Socialism, and
many other ideologies of Blut und Boden, creating an artistic
mix of inconsistent aggression, which has been identified in
liberal and left-wing discourses with an ironic relation to the
totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Žižek argues that such
a view betrays an underlying anxiety, because it tends to
view irony with suspicion. The parodistic, according to this
latent ideologically motivated mistrust, must be based on a
distancing of ourselves from radical political positions. This
interpretation is badly mistaken because it demands clear,
concise positions in a space of play where such positions are
impossible to maintain. The energy of ironic/post-ironic play
originates from ideological ambiguity, which confuses all
those who attach themselves to fixed ideas and clearly defined
political views. Žižek claims that the art of Laibach does not
lie in the “answers” it gives. Deliberately, Laibach fails to
 Hungarofuturist Productions of Hauntology
quarantine itself from reactions coming from other ideological
directions. Rather, it operates like a guerrilla army, confusing
fronts, distances and levels, while always keeping the “ques-
tion” of identity open. The expropriation of ideological codes,
if it is to be effective, must be based on an exposure of the
latent inconsistencies within all ideologies, including those
which masquerade in the form of everyday commonsense.
Beneath the everyday, the obscene is waiting to come to the
surface. The hidden, telluric, transgressive “night” is an ove-
ridentification of the total system’s secrets, making explicit
the occluded core of power’s obscene phallic superego. In a
radically eminent manner, power-rhetoric is expanded beyond
its borders, to the point of exploding it. This is the oppression
of oppression; ideology’s solar and lunar aspects are both
brought to light by a method of symbiotic parasitism. Hunga-
rofuturism is a Laibach-style occupation and manipulation of
the nationalist ideological code. The geopolitical mythology
of Hungarian national exceptionalism is not enough for HUF,
which expands the narrative of Hungarianness into the cosmic
reaches of outer space.
We may register the presence of something like a Hungaro-
futurist spatio-temporal tactics in certain Hungarian neo-avant-
garde works. Several texts by Miklós Erdély, for example, deal
with time travel as well as the topic of anachronicity. From our
perspective, the poems from Erdély’s book kollapszus orv. are
especially pertinent. Borrowing the figure of the “mollusk”,
the poet builds an entire artistic and natural scientific discourse
around this invertebrate creature, bringing it into connection
with Einstein’s theory of relativity, with its emphasis on the
mobility of all coordinate systems, as well as the spiritist idea
of “ectoplasm”: “The ectoplasm is identified as a mollusk,
and its meaning is a revelation, a ‘communication’ which is
non-solid, its ‘convulsive’, quilt-like being is the perfect illus-
tration of the Einsteinian theory of relativity. It is not authentic
just because it is soft, like an eiderdown, because in the case of
a successful séance, the ectoplasm can take on a form. Rather,
the ectoplasm can be a definite representation of the mollusk,
because it breaks up linear time, as well as the linearity of
time and the irreversibility of death. Communication with the
dead has a time of its own, in which temporality is dislocated
through anachronism. Anachronism is a relative time, intro-
ducing us to an other time, and this other temporality resists
the everyday, interrupting the rational, the linear, the con-
tinuous-time that which breaks.” (András Müllner: Tükör a
sötétséghez – Erdély Miklós kollapszus orv. című kötetéről,
Magyar Műhely Kiadó, Budapest, 2016, 146.) Ectoplasm
is a media for the materialization of spirit, an expanding,
growing process, an eventual present communicating its
own non-simultaneity. To understand the extra-sensuality
of ectoplasm, we can refer back to Derrida, who attempts
to differentiate between revenant and specter. The latter is a
paradoxical embodiment of spirit, a becoming-corporeal of
the incorporeal, but this incarnation is self-contradictory,
complicated. The “thing” a specter becomes is neither soul
nor body. It is an in-betweenness: “in the very coming of
51
the revenant or the return of the specter. There is something
disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reappa-
rition of the departed. The spirit, the specter are not the
same thing, and we will have to sharpen this difference;
but as for what they have in common, one does not know
what it is, what it is presently It is something that one does
not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely
it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds
to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance,
but because this non-object, this non-present present, this
being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs
to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks
one knows by the name of knowledge. One does not know
if it is living or if it is dead. (...) Nor does one see in flesh
and blood this Thing that is not a thing, this thing that is
invisible between its apparitions, when it reappears. This
Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even
when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all
specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachro-
ny.” (Derrida: Specters of Marx, 5-6) Erdély’s ectoplasm
operates in a phanto-phenomenal manner, showing the
incoherence of both national narratives and more broadly
the entire modern worldview. For nationalism too is a
modernist ideology, a product of progressive 19th-century
European modernity. What Hungarofuturist and neo-avant-
garde praxis alike open is a point of intrusion where the
anachronic invades the structure of everyday temporal
and spatial perception. The phantom body is composed
of ectoplasm, but this desynchronizing presence can only
 Hungarofuturist Productions of Hauntology
be accessed through desynchronozing ourselves too in the
process, unleashing shell effects. We cannot see that which
observes us; only the liquidity of our liquid reality remains,
whose eventual nature and our own lived time alike are en-
veloped by the “alienness” of the mollusk’s “quilty” nature.
Anachronism as a politics of time lends itself to another
type of neo-avant-garde treatment. We refer here to Tamás
Szentjóby’s anecdote documented by János Kósa in a disserta-
tion. According to this anecdote, the French soldiers marching
toward Moscow in 1812 discovered a Honda motor lying in
a field. Kósa later integrated this pseudo-historic perspective
into his painting, creating phantom-effects from the mixture
of different temporal levels, with both philosophical and aes-
thetic consequences. As Kósa recounts, “Napoleon’s army was
heading through Vilnius on the road to Moscow. The incident
happened on the outskirts of the city. Three infantrymen,
after they had done their day’s work, were taking a rest. The
weather was autumnal, it was getting colder than the summer,
darker too, but they nonetheless lay down in the grass. They
chatted and smoked a pipe. At that moment, something strange
happened. Temporal dimensions opened up and collapsed into
one another: the past coincided with the present. The three
soldiers found themselves next to a late 20th century Honda
motorbike. It lay there in the grass, in the middle of the field.
Surprisingly, the soldiers were unsurprised. They could not
have seen it, their perception did not register its presence. In
a physical sense, the Honda motorbike affected them, but the
vision failed to become an image.” Building on Szentjóby’s
anecdote, Kósa argues that we can break down perception to
a state before the primacy of vision. This flux recognizes the
motorbike as something, but its function cannot be identified
because in 1812 the techno-cultural “world” into which such
an object fits was not yet present.
As Kósa states, “human thinking is analogical. We can only
see that which we can connect back to previous experience or
to knowledge of objects. According to Tamás Szentjóby the
Honda motorbike was so new to the three soldiers that they
could never have perceived it in the figure of an image. One of
the soldiers even emptied his pipe onto the windshield of the
bike, seeing it as nothing more than another nondescript part
of the landscape, as a geographic body, as it were, whose form
is suitable for such an action. But its unknowability remained
foreign to them. After a couple of minutes, the three soldiers
got up and returned to their formation.” The object’s form
was suitable for putting out a tobacco pipe on it, this was the
only way it could have functioned, being therefore occluded
from view. “This story is like a parable. The absolutely new
cannot be accessed or perceived. Millions upon millions of
‘new’ objects surround us in our environments; if we cannot
conceptualize or connect them back to something known, we
cannot do anything with them. The modernist avant-garde, with
its intent to reject tradition, its desperation to say something
‘new’, is in a way parodied by this story.” While some of
Kósa’s insinuations are debatable – the motorbike is, after all,
more than a mere empty space in the space of representation,
53
functioning rather as a type of optical illusion, which is and is
not, like an absent presence. Szentjóby’s story, in Kósa’s inter-
pretation, forms an ironic parable of the old-new metaphysics
enacted by avant-garde modernity. When all is said and done,
the absolutely new is impotent because of its invisibility. A
message nobody can understand is not a very good mode of
communication. All this is entirely valid, but this technical
object can only be conceived of as being “new” compared with
the early 19th century if we accept a linear and narrative view of
history. The incongruity stems from a prior linearity. Complete
invisibility, as achieved or, less charitably, visited upon itself,
by the avant-garde, is only possible if we accept a linear view
of history. Szentjóby’s story is not strange because the French
soldiers fail to recognize the Honda as a Honda, but rather be-
cause the introduction of this vehicle opens up a weird temporal
dissymmetry in the specular order. This rupture, break and
decomposition is the desynchronization of image perception,
and as such represents an image of discontinuity inserted into
a different temporal segment, making history memory stuck
in its own self-contradictions while remaining in the form of
a trace. Each remnant is also a specter, whose mobility haunts
Louis Visaire, the poet who “registers” the scene.
Another example is also pertinent, in the sense that it registers
a weird anachronism. The utopian socialist thinker Charles
Fourier designed an ideal collectivist community, with apart-
ment buildings and equality among all residents. He named this
construct the “phalanstery” (phalanstère), and even designed
a flag replete with the seven colors of the color spectrum.
Each color signified a certain passion. (Walter Benjamin:
The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin, Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 1999,
641) Weirdly, this imaginary flag resembles what we now rec-
ognize as the “rainbow flag”, popular in the LGBT movement. In
Fourier’s day and age, the very idea of a movement based on
sexual identity was unknown. Nobody would have understood
what such a concept is even supposed to mean. Not even a
utopian could have dreamed of such a development whereby
the personal becomes political, although Fourier already ex-
pressed markedly feminist ideas about gender equality which
were ahead of their time. And yet, the socialist dreamer found
himself designing an ensign resembling that is used by the
Pride movement over a century later. Fourier could not have
known that he was planning the LGBT movement’s flag. His
perception failed to register this possibility. Interestingly, in
1925, the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), inspired
in part by Fourier’s ideas, adopted the rainbow flag as its main
symbol in 1925. (Jack Schaffer: Historical Dictionary of the
Cooperative Movement, Lanham and London: Scarecrow
Press, 193) Even then, the purpose of the flag was apparently
not realized. Or could it be that today we do not recognize its
ideological content? Symbols can become depoliticized over
time, as they are mainstreamed, stripped of their subversive po-
tential by integration into the system. Past and present cannot
be entirely separated though. Something of its anti-systematic
origins persists in the rainbow flag. The future is an absent
presence that infiltrates the past. It is already here, we just
failed to notice its potential because of its invisibility. This
presence is not entirely evident; rather, it is a presence situated
outside of linearity, a rescription along the lines of anachronic-
ity, breaking up the flow of time. The specter is not “new”, but
neither is it the repetition of that which was. It does not have to
be viewed as second or third. It is both second and third, etc.,
both beginning and ending, locking in one. As Derrida writes,
“it is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that
no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or
to a living future.” (Derrida: Specters of Marx, 123)
László Karácsonyi’s painting, Bús magyar sors II./Gloomy
Hungarian Fate II.(2009), is an excellent example of an ap-
plied Hungarofuturist aesthetics, as it represents a post-Hun-
garian tactical logistic of time. The work is based on János
Tornyai’s Bús magyar sors/Gloomy Hungarian Fate (1908),
which is an emblematic example of virulent early 20th cen-
tury Hungarian nationalist allegorical painting, displaying
the tragic-heroic narrative of Hungarian exceptionalism with
a Hungarian plains landscape. Karácsonyi destabilizes the
abandoned but still eminently “Hungarian” landscape by
inserting a futuristic technological object from the Star Wars
films into the scene. The mechanical robot resembles Tornyai’s
tired horse, intended in turn to represent the tiredness of the
exploited, oppressed Hungarian peasant in the context of a
sadomasochistic national grievance narrative. The history of
the Hungarians is conceptualized as being held “captive” by a
hostile “Great Fallow” (István Széchenyi), forming a traumat-
ic history of suffering. This idea of an unavoidable national
fate can be viewed as a product of self-colonialization, for it
absolves Hungarians of any responsibility for their historical
actions, producing a psychotic national identity that gains energy
from the position of passive victimhood. Tornyai’s painting is
an aesthetic prosthesis of the nation-machine, reproducing a
self-traumatizing national identity built on resentment against
a variety of “others” keeping the Hungarians down while also
making this position perversely enjoyable.
Hungarofuturist aesthetics involves the occupation of
previousart forms, harassing classic works, confusing the
nation-machine. With this guerrilla warfare, a post-Hungarian
“land-taking” is achieved as an act of haunting. The land-taking
is, in this case, a complication of the original act of conquest.
Instead of a tired horse, we see in Karácsonyi’s painting a
damaged AT-AT (All-Terrain-Armored-Transport), a machine
of the Galactic Empire. The first representation of this tech-
nology in the Star Wars film franchise occurs during the Battle
of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back, the second part which
should be the fifth installment according to the chronology of
the Star Wars-universe. The number “2” refers to this status,
but also to its relation to Tornyai’s painting, referring back
to the “original” which itself is a nationalist construct. The
supposed singularity of the Hungarian national narrative is
therefore desynchronized, falling apart into a series of inco-
herent repetitions, doubles and haunting phantom copies. A
national fate “strikes back”, we cannot escape from it, but
this also means that authenticity can be repeated too. Passive
detemporalization? That could very well be the case.
The suffering, tired workhorse has been swallowed up by
a spacetime wormhole, replaced by a mechanized animal. Its
55
transformation into a Machine is complete. Yet the temporal
disharmony here is not just a matter of technology. Rather,
it consists in a “retrofuturization.” The modernist priority of
the future as compared with an outdated past is replaced with
interpenetration by fictional pop-cultural codes. A sanctified
cultural space has thereby been complexified. This represents
something more than the parody of a supposedly “atavistic”
national identity from a decadently postmodern perspective.
Something more complex is at play here in Karácsonyi’s
work. Overidentification radicalizes national identity from
within, through hypertrophy of representation, extending the
Hungarian mythology into the reaches of outer space. The
post-Hungarian national passion is too broad for the Great
Hungarian Plain. Our homeland is unlimited, the land-taking
must be expanded everywhere. Let us think big once again,
learning to think in a largeness that is unimaginable.
This intention raises a number of questions. Why exactly
does the lame horse become transformed into an AT-AT? The
latter is, after all, the war technology of an oppressive regime
in Star Wars, fighting relatively low-tech opponents who pre-
vail in the Battle of Hoth. A recurrent element in the Hungarian
national narrative is the seemingly perennially rebellious,
“underdog” status of Hungarians throughout their history.
From this perspective, the analogical medium of national
consciousness belongs to the military arsenal of an empire.
Could the Habsburg Empire be the Evil Galactic Empire? Or,
worse, could this be a European Union battle machine, sent to
pacify us recalcitrant, economically colonized Hungarians? Or,
conversely, does it represent an allegory for the zombie-like
revival of an old-new hegemonically oriented Hungarian na-
tionalism in the post-2006 era? One possible answer to the
status of Karácsonyi’s AT-AT could lie in a Hungarofuturist re-

Hungarofuturist Productions of Hauntology

programming of dominant narratives, including the tragic-he-
roic paranoiac idea of Hungarians as the permanent underdogs
of their own history. The oppression of oppression produces
sadomasochistic impulses. The nation-machine could very
well be undergoing a self-colonization, infecting itself with
its own paranoia. Victimhood-status needs plausible fictions.
We are at once the barbarians and masters of our own empire,
minorities within our Hungarianness.
Another important perspective relates to the condition of
Karácsonyi’s AT-AT. This is a damaged, leaking machine, which
is limping as if it were the remnant of a defeated military.
We lack the context of The Empire Strikes Back, there is no
evidence here of any battle. If we know the film, it can be
projected into the painting, but we ourselves also trip over in
the process. It is precisely the corruption of temporal registers
that provides evidence of the operation of desynchronization.
Temporal dislocation presents us with something melancholic.
A phenomenal layer comes through, but with Karácsonyi, it is
more than a case of a problematized Great Hungarian Plain,
but rather, a reflection upon the nation-machine itself. As if
the AT-AT, as nation-building machinery, were starting to fall
apart. Or perhaps it fell from the Planet Hoth onto the Hun-
garian landscape, where it serves to represents the ever more
melancholic decline of the Great National Technology. From
this perspective, Bús magyar sors II./Gloomy Hungarian Fate

57
II. can be viewed as a Hungarofuturist burial service for a
nation in demographic decline, a nation-machine terminally
ill. We celebrate this condition, nostalgic for a new national
outgrowth, animated by a parasitical love.
The above examples show that the Hungarian is not really
declining. In a biological and spiritual sense, we are actually
growing, feeding upon both past and future. Hungarofuturism
gives hope for us: our time is not up. On this view, Hungarian
consciousness can change in a qualitative manner, becom-
ing open to the future instead of being locked up in its own
self-referential psychoses. Instead of a teleology, we pursue a
beyond outside linearity. Reprogramming the nation-machine,
we produce inorganic forms of consciousness, anachronisms,
phantomlike events, hybridizing both world and history. The
result is a paradoxical ectoplasmic flesh. Something that
should not be, but still nevertheless is. A distant presence, this
is the mode of being of Hungarofuturism. The post-Hungarian
land-taking is far from over. Like a haunting, it inhabits the
plains of distant planets. Conquest can be nothing, if not a
refoundation of the nation on another plane. Fort/da: not a
repetition, but a return, to Sirius. Ad Astra!
 Imprint

XENOTOPIA Art Director: English Translation:

Volume 1., 2020 Mark Fridvalszki Ádám Lovász, Zoltán Móra
& Marius Wenker
Co-Editor-in-Chief: Special Thanks to:
Zsolt Miklósvölgyi Graphic Design: Kriszina Hunya, Daniel Hüttler, Áron Lődi,
Márió Z. Nemes Marius Wenker OFF-Biennale Budapest, Márk Szapora, Katalin Székely

Image Credits:
(p. 6 / 7, 8 / 9) Collages from Hungarofuturism: Manifesto,
2018, edited by Mark Fridvalszki; (p. 13) Illustration by Mark
Fridvalszki; (p. 16) Histories of Easternfuturism, video
installation by Kajet Journal and Dragoș Vasiloaia, Jerusalem
Design Week, 2019; (p. 17) Image by Tamás Komoróczky,
2004; (p. 18/17) Images by Land3C, 2019; (p. 21) Illustration
by Mark Fridvalszki; (p. 23) Illustration by Mark Fridvalszki;
(p. 24/25) Suzanne Treister: HEXEN 2.0, tarot cards, 2009-2011;
(p. 27) Illustration by Mark Fridvalszki; (p. 31) Csaba Kis
Róka: Premonition of Decay, oil on canvas, 60x60 cm, 2019;
(p. 33) Csaba Kis Róka: Doppelgänger, oil and acrilyc on canvas,
160x170 cm, 2019; (p. 34/35) Collages by Zoltán Komor, 2019,

59
edited by Mark Fridvalszki; (p. 39) Illustration by Mark Fridvalszki;
(p. 40) Csaba Kis Róka: Phallic Triumph of the Most Ancient
Unwritten Laws, oil on canvas, 160x180 cm, 2011; (p. 43) László
Karácsonyi: Gloomy Hungarian Fate II., oil on canvas, 60x70 cm,
2010; (p. 45, 46, 49, 51, 53) Collages by Márió Z. Nemes, 2019,
edited by Marius Wenker; (p. 54) Illustration for the prose King
Opium by Márió Z. Nemes, mixed media on paper, 21x29,7 cm,
2017; (p. 55) László Győrffy: Project Miasma – Minister of Justice,
oil on canvas, 40x45 cm, 2018; (p. 57) Mark Fridvalszki: Lovers
of the Sun, digital collage, 2019

Published by:
Technologie und das Unheimliche (T+U)

Berlin, Germany
Budapest, Hungary

http://technologieunddasunheimliche.com
technologieunddasunheimliche@gmail.com

The project was commissioned by OFF-Biennale Budapest 2020.

http://offbiennale.hu
“For HUF to tap into such latency
would mean to expand on its inter-
scalar capacities, acting as a vector
that runs through ethnic dimensions,
approximates cosmic magnitudes,
and draws on xenofuturist orbits.”
– Mahan Moalemi

2020