The aesthetic of sand and imaginary journeys – Sári Zagyvai: Distant Impressions (2019–2020)

Sári Zagyvai took an interest in the traces of exotic lands around her in 2019.

“You get transported out of the daily grind by notions of holidays and exotic lands, but you can’t always leave for an extended time. In this state of immobility, I search for local experiences, ones that can capture my imagination and divert it towards distant things for a moment or two. I take my pictures at Budapest locales, close to my home, some parts of which conjure up, directly or indirectly, impressions of distant places. The sandpits near my home, where my son played every day, were such locales, where the aesthetic of the sand captured my imagination. The sandpits would trigger ideas of distant lands, and would set off games of association: we built, for instance, the ruined city of Petra, the Giza pyramids, the bird and the monkey from the Nazca Lines.”

Zagyvai chose local scenes for her work in the second year of her Pécsi József Photographic Scholarship (as she did in the first year), devising dream-like or imaginary journeys.

“I was looking for traces of the exotic in the ethnic restaurants of Budapest. It is the decor that lends itself most easily to visual representation, though the scents and tastes also conjure up distant places. That is why I built various remote areas in the form of food constructs. Incorporating imagination in the work, along with visual association, is about the impossible undertaking to fulfil the desire. Imagination makes the invisible visible, or gives voice to the absence.”