Folk belief attributes the name of Lake Balaton to the last of the giants once inhabiting the region. As humans steadily encroached upon their land, the giants’ numbers dwindled. For a long time, giants and humans lived together peacefully in the forests nearby. However, when Balaton, the giant lost his only daughter, due to a human’s abandoning, he himself perished in his despair, and the giants finally disappeared from the region. With the disappearance of the giants came the loss of a mediating force that held the human and natural realms in unity. The void they left behind was filled with a new kind of experience: a sense of estrangement that enables a longing for connection rather than its achievement.

With the disappearance of the giants came the loss of a mediating force that held the human and natural realms in unity. The void they left behind was filled with a new kind of experience: a sense of estrangement that enables a longing for connection rather than its achievement. This state, the failure to tame the fear of nature or to fully experience unity with nature puts humans in a state where humanity and nature as its Other emerge as two poles, opposed to each other. The Other, which is embodied by nature, contrasts human finiteness and knowability with its own infinity and inherent otherness. This separation, over time, transforms into estrangement. As a result of this process of estrangement, the feeling of vulnerability to nature that humanity has lived with for thousands of years, is transmuted into fear and anxiety.

To alleviate that, humans try to connect with nature by transforming it into an accessible, addressable form, even if that form is unpredictable and terrifying, and above all unknown. The spiritual forces posited behind phenomena try to endow this unknown with some shape through which we can try to understand the world and ourselves to take the edge off the uncertainty and the gripping fears, or at least to share them with others and thereby find a refuge from them. The certainty of not being alone with our fears sets the strength of community next to the isolation of the individual. We write and read stories and tales that serve this redemptive understanding and the exposure, sharing and safe experience of fears. Instead of trying to banish fear, we would like to experience security in its presence.

Worry over the future of the planet and humanity is a recent phenomenon driven by the recognition that unworthy treatment causes irreversible damage to Earth, and the human soul is shackled by a feeling of helplessness about this slow destruction. Once any motivation for action becomes futile, the thread binding the stories told are grief and shock over the loss, something we try to inhabit rather than escape.

The exhibition traverses the distance that stretches between humans and their environment through the works of both foreign and Hungarian artists. The artworks reflect on the change in this relationship while also showcasing attempts to tame this distance, which, despite all odds, may still be transformed into intimacy.
When We Became Strangers is a selection and rearrangement of works from the EKO 9 Triennial organized by UGM | Maribor Art Gallery in 2024. The title of the Maribor Triennial was Eyes in the Stone, referring to an emblematic site of Slovenian landscape, a natural rock formation of Mount Prisojnik resembling a young woman’s face. The Budapest selection chooses to reflect on the sensitivities of the local context by evoking Lake Balaton, a similarly mythologized site of the Hungarian landscape deeply redolent of imagery.

Artistic director of the Triennial of Art and Environment EKO 9: Jure Kirbiš, UGM | Maribor Art Gallery