Katalin Pusztaszeri

My series "Detritus and Decay" was born during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. I used the bold and sometimes ruthless scenery of the rocky Danube bank. At the heart of the series lie old age, death, decay, and dilapidation. The gaze turns to stone within the landscape; the face dissolves into the rocky, stony terrain itself. A torrent of stones pours over the gray hair of a dead body lying on the ground, signaling an immovable, unchangeable state from which there is no escape—no way out from this no-man's-land.

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The figures and shadows are melding into the rocks and the dry, fragmented mass of earth slivers; an old, moldy poster peels off the wall, the identity of the characters becomes unrecognizable. Shadows merge with the formations of the environment; a body bag spreads across the shadow; the jawbone of a ruminant animal begins to decay on the ground.

 

The riverbank, with its decaying environment wrapped in a thick, shushing silence, is a place where the only echo is the steady, ancient murmur of water rolling over stones. It is a place beyond time, a stretch of landscape forgotten by the world, leaving the land bare and stoic. Sharp rocks and smooth stones cover the bank in haphazard patterns, like the strewn memories of something dead, half-remembered and buried. They come to forget or perhaps to be forgotten.