BPNY – day 1

first day in Budapest recapped. it’s day 2 now. I’m only woken up for a while. preparing a bath while I write. the refrigerator is busted and the toilet acts a little strange sometimes, but otherwise, the apartment I’m staying at isn’t half-bad. it’s on Kiss József utca (google map here), in Józsefváros, or District VIII, of the Pest side of Budapest.

got off the plane and sat in arrivals for a few minutes. Gabor was picking me up, and he didn’t recognize me having shaved and with the cap on, so that was entertaining when he finally realized who I was! we headed first to the apartment I’m staying at, but my roommates (Ian and Adrian) were not in, they had already left, so we had to cart my belongings to the architecture studio where we have set up shop for the past two weeks, preparing work and cutting materials, etc. of course, no one was there either, as it was only 9:30am or so. I dropped off my luggage and then we headed to some film studio way out in the outskirts of Pest, where we were tipped off that we might be able to acquire some props for our installation.

this place was amazing. the director guy, also named Gabor, was really friendly, and they didn’t mind us just roaming around their entire facility and trying to find things that we could use. they had around 5 full-size (10-12,000 square feet) studios where they do shoots in; in one of them they were building a room and had an entire corner green-screened. they had a humongous and well-supplied woodshop, and another huge room for painting and storage. their back lot was full of raw materials like lumber and prefabricated items like doors, windows, chairs and they had a whole area of just scrap materials. all for the pickins. great place. and really amazing that from one Hungarian to another they were just going to give us whatever we wanted, to assist us with our projects! no deals, no contracts, no money, just a handshake!

the workers were mostly carpenters, with a few a/v and lighting technicians strewn about. everybody smoked profusely, some didn’t wear shirts or socks, and nobody used a ventilator mask when spraypainting or handling materials that were releasing loads of dust into the air. and yet nobody sneezed or coughed. it would seem their lungs are built differently over here.

unfortunately we were supposed to meet a number of the Flux Factory people out here, and wound up waiting nearly two hours for them to arrive. the woes of local transport and a train that was unknowingly running express meant it was lunchtime (literally, all the film people sat down to a huge communal lunch) before they showed up. they spent 10 minutes saying ‘this stuff is great, we need a truck, we’ll be back tomorrow’ and then we left. yup.

proceeded into the city. two quick train hops got us within walking distance of the architecture studio.

I didn’t have a clue where we were but it was obvious that you really can walk much of the city quite quickly. we weaved around and Aya knew where she was going and got us to the architecture studio with only 25 minutes walking. we even beat the people who were talking public transport!

Színházterem. “Studio” perhaps? Peekaboo Jean!

The studio looked crazy. Around a dozen people all going nuts with their own projects. some Frenchies drove in from Paris, Chen was here, Daupo was present, Kerry showed up later, and from what I hear in two weeks they had pretty much made and trashed entire sections of the installation, as it could never be decided who should do what and what looked best. Almost no work had been advanced on the diorama, even though it was demanded over 10 days ago that when Kerry left she had to take all of my completed work for the diorama with her, and any other materials I wanted to work with, because they were determined to complete the diorama ‘this week’ (meaning over 10 days ago). It was more or less unworked, and only a dozen elements had even been glued down and secured as, again, no one could conclude on what should be done or what looked best. The festival opens in eight days!

The diorama:

My first evening here. I didn’t really sleep on the plane and since it is the next day, at this point I hadn’t slept in around 36 hours. Ian and Adrian were still nowhere to be found, they had my key, so while I made some work right off the boat (some buildings for Daupo’s facade) I was starting to go a little crazy. I lay down on the floor and people piled strips of cardboard on me. Everybody – everybody! – had left and it was well past midnight while I sit in this room, going stir-crazy, waiting for Ian and Adrian to finally show up and walk me home. We didn’t get home until after 1am. Like I say the apartment isn’t all that bad.

And right now that bath sounds reeeeeeeal nice!