THE COMPASS (2017)
flowers, floral foam, styrofoam, mortar
variable dimensions
The Compass evokes Budapest’s interwar Revisionist Monument. The Monument was conceived as a reminder of the dismembered Kingdom of Hungary, calling for the revision of the Versailles Treaties - regaining Hungarian-majority areas. While the giant flowerbed around the monument represented Greater Hungary with Croatia as an integral part of it, the allegorical figures on the four plinths - North, East, South and West - did not. South only had an ethnic German girl seeking refuge from the Serbs in the embrace of the Hungarian peasant.
This omission left some circles in dismay, demanding a fifth plinth for the lost sea. Between the empty plinths of The Compass the original flowerbed is revisited in the shape of a starfish - capable of regeneration after the loss of a part - is inching toward an imaginary fifth plinth with its growing arm. The foundation of the analogy between the starfish and Hungary is both underlined by the iconography of the “mutilated nation body” used ever since the Trianon Peace Treaty.