Mapping the Local: Memory, Space, & Everyday Testimony

Transforming the Ordinary into Cinematic Vision

During the Spring Semester 2025/2026–2, I developed and taught the seminar Mapping the Local: Memory, Space, & Everyday Testimony at the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Conceived as a practice-based and research-oriented platform, the seminar investigated the relationship between urban space, memory, personal testimony, and contemporary moving-image practices through video, photography, sound, and archival methodologies.

The seminar emerged from my ongoing artistic and theoretical research surrounding The Ordinary Moment and the role of everyday life within contemporary visual culture. Central to the course was the proposition that the ordinary is not merely a subject matter, but a methodological and philosophical position through which artistic meaning can be reconfigured. Against the acceleration, spectacle, and overproduction of images characteristic of contemporary media environments, the seminar encouraged students to approach ordinary experiences, gestures, spaces, routines, and encounters as sites of cinematic and artistic inquiry.

Positioned between documentary filmmaking, contemporary art, and urban studies, the course examined how meaning can emerge through proximity, duration, observation, and personal engagement with lived reality. Rather than prioritizing spectacle or predetermined narratives, students were encouraged to investigate how the overlooked fragments of everyday urban life could be transformed into forms of cinematic testimony and visual reflection.

Throughout the semester, the city was approached not simply as geography, but as a historically layered and emotionally charged environment shaped by memory, displacement, movement, intimacy, and socio-political structures. Public transportation, temporary homes, streets, routines, overlooked architectures, and transitional spaces became material through which students reflected on belonging, migration, visibility, and the emotional surfaces of urban existence.

The seminar combined theoretical discussions with practical production methodologies. Lectures addressed themes including urban memory, public space, phenomenology, documentary realism, archival practices, narrative structures in non-fiction cinema, and the politics of representation. Particular emphasis was placed on understanding cinematic language beyond technical execution, encouraging students to consider framing, duration, juxtaposition, rhythm, sound, and movement as conceptual tools capable of constructing emotional and philosophical relationships between image and viewer.

The practical component of the course involved the development of individual and collaborative projects using observational filmmaking, video essays, photography, interviews, found footage, personal archives, and experimental media practices. Students were invited to approach audiovisual production as both artistic practice and research methodology, constructing works situated between documentary representation and subjective experience.

A central objective of the seminar was the transformation of ordinary experience into cinematic vision: the process through which everyday encounters and personal memories become forms of visual thought. In this context, documentary practice was approached not as the transparent recording of reality, but as a reflective and relational process through which images can preserve ambiguity, emotional complexity, and lived temporality.

The semester concluded with a public screening and discussion program titled:

Mapping the Local: Memory, Space, & Everyday Testimony

A Collective Testimony of Urban Experience

The event presented a series of student works developed throughout the semester and functioned as a collective reflection on locality, urban experience, memory, and contemporary documentary practices.

Participating students included:
Eszter Albert, Florencia Aguilera Molina, Virág Anna Benkovics, Blanka Ilona Bodnár, Borbély Polla, Martina Bús, Aliua Carreao Parya, Carla Cembellín, Emilly Connel, Andreya Gandeva, Míra Horváth, Anna Jarai, Eva Lidsky, Mich Maguire, Karile Meidute, Jessica Mozgova, Krisztia Nemeth, Cara O’Dononvann, Emily Peacock, Mary Ellen Peters, Nadin Poos, Irene Sai, Belén Sánchez López-Tello, Mischa Scherrhout, Scarlett Ann Simmons, Jesse Lucjan Stegmann, Zsuzsanna Szentpeteri, Viktorie Tomášová, and László Zelei.