Article, News
May 15, 2026

Mapping the Local: Memory, Space, & Everyday Testimony

Mapping the Local 2025/2026–2

Memory, Space, and Everyday Testimony

The Spring Semester 2025/2026–2 of Mapping the Local was led by filmmaker, artist, and researcher Mansour Forouzesh. His practice-based approach combines documentary filmmaking, personal testimony, realism, and the relationship between image, memory, and lived experience. Drawing from both cinematic and artistic methodologies, the semester encouraged students to approach everyday life as material for critical and creative reflection.

This semester focused on the relationship between memory, urban space, personal testimony, and moving images. Students were invited to explore how everyday encounters with the city can become cinematic and artistic material through documentary practices, photography, sound, archival fragments, and personal narratives.

The course approached locality not simply as geography, but as lived experience. Public spaces, streets, transportation systems, temporary homes, routines, and forgotten corners of the city became sites through which students reflected on belonging, displacement, intimacy, and observation. The seminar examined how urban environments carry layered histories and socio-political traces while simultaneously producing highly personal and subjective experiences.

Drawing inspiration from documentary filmmakers and artists such as Dziga Vertov, Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, and Abbas Kiarostami, students investigated how the ordinary can be transformed into cinematic testimony.

Through video essays, observational recordings, photography, interviews, and experimental media practices, participants reflected on the ways individuals position themselves within public space and how memory becomes embedded within the surfaces of the city.

Practice During the Semester

Throughout the semester, students engaged in a combination of theoretical discussions, screenings, practical workshops, and collaborative critiques. Sessions included readings on urban memory, public space, documentary practices, and site-specific artistic interventions, alongside analyses of films and artworks addressing the relationship between the individual and the city.

Students were encouraged to develop projects through processes of observation, walking, recording, collecting, and archiving. Personal media materials—including photographs, phone videos, sound recordings, texts, and found images—became starting points for artistic investigation. The seminar emphasized experimentation and process-based research rather than fixed narrative structures.

Working individually or collaboratively, participants produced short video works and image-based projects that explored themes such as migration, belonging, alienation, everyday rituals, historical traces, and emotional geographies of urban life. The final outcome of the semester culminated in a public screening and presentation in which the works were organized into thematic blocks followed by discussions and audience engagement.

The seminar ultimately functioned as a shared space for dialogue, reflection, and artistic experimentation, where the city itself became both subject and medium.

Seminar Lectures and Thematic Framework

During the seminar, a series of lectures, screenings, and discussions explored how the city can be approached as a site of memory, observation, and personal testimony. Through contemporary art, documentary cinema, and urban theory, the course examined how everyday experiences, public spaces, and personal encounters can be transformed into forms of artistic reflection and cinematic expression.

1. Mapping the Local: Locality, Memory, and Artistic Practice

Introduction to Contemporary Urban Testimony

This lecture introduces the conceptual and methodological framework of the seminar, focusing on locality as a lived, historical, and mediated experience. Through discussions on contemporary artistic practice, the session examines how memory, public space, and personal testimony can function as material for moving-image and research-based works.

2. City as Surface

Urban Space, Historical Layers, and the Politics of Visibility

This lecture examines the city as a layered socio-political and historical construct shaped by memory, architecture, movement, and power. Drawing from philosophy, urban theory, and documentary cinema, the session investigates how urban environments function simultaneously as archives, ideological structures, and spaces of everyday experience.

3. Memory, Archive, and Testimony

Personal Histories and Documentary Representation

Focusing on archival practices and autobiographical media, this lecture explores the relationship between personal memory and collective history. The session addresses the role of documentary images, found materials, and testimony in constructing subjective and fragmented narratives of urban experience.

4. Documentary and the Everyday

Observation, Duration, and Cinematic Realism

This lecture investigates how documentary filmmaking transforms ordinary life into cinematic form. Through the analysis of observational cinema, essay film, and performative documentary practices, the session explores temporality, repetition, and the aesthetics of everyday experience.

5. Public Space and Artistic Intervention

Participation, Presence, and Urban Agency

This session examines the position of the artist within public space and addresses the political dimensions of visibility, participation, and spatial control. The lecture considers how artistic practices engage with urban environments through intervention, observation, and collective interaction.

6. Narrative Structures in Documentary Practice

Writing Memory, Space, and Subjectivity

This lecture introduces narrative strategies for short documentary and essayistic filmmaking. Focusing on autobiographical storytelling, voice-over, and cinematic structure, the session explores how personal experiences and spatial encounters can be translated into visual narratives.

7. Image, Sound, and Media Assemblage

Experimental Approaches to Audiovisual Construction

This session focuses on the relationship between image, sound, archive, and montage in contemporary moving-image practices. Students explore methods of editing, sequencing, layering, and combining media materials to construct poetic and critical forms of documentary expression.

8. Collective Screening and Critical Reflection

Presentation, Discussion, and Public Engagement

The final session presents the completed student projects within a public screening format. Accompanied by discussions and collective reflection, the session considers how personal testimonies and urban observations can contribute to broader conversations surrounding locality, memory, and public space.

Screening
Wednesday, 20 May | 18:30
Hungarian University of Fine Arts | Projection Room
1062 Budapest, Andrássy út 69–71

An evening of short films, video essays, photography, and experimental moving-image works developed during the Mapping the Local seminar.

The projects explore memory, locality, urban space, belonging, displacement, and everyday experience through documentary and artistic practices.

Screening followed by Q&A.
Intermedia Department