Dystopia of a Plastic Thermal Bath – by Julia Vegh

Can we invite you to a wonderful plastic thermal bathing?

We are going to fill a whole thermal bath pool with empty plastic bottles for you to give the opportunity for to take bath in it and enjoy.

The final art product will be a video installation: a pair of videos. The first one is the documentation of the happening with the involved audience in the plastic bath. The other one is much more a science fiction with fictive elements at the same location in the same set in Kiraly Bath in Budapest, Hungary. This one shows an utopistic vision of Earth when plastic already replaces the water in thermal baths and water taps. These future prospects are ironic and grotesque. We see the happy and careless old and young people swimming among the plastic bottles like at a usual lido. They behave naturally, spend their free time in the plastic trash. It’s a kind of fake documentary film. The water is present only in the soundtrack as babble what creates the lack of it much more. The discrepancy of the real and fake documentaries creates the tension what makes the audience think about our existing problem of plastic pollution.

Our group PLASTICBATH consists of two artists, a painter and a filmmaker.

The painter Júlia Odin Végh was born in 1990 in Budapest. She lives and works in Hungary. She has graduated at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (MKE) in 2015. She won art prizes like ESSL Art Award CEE in 2015, Barcsay Jeno Fine Art Foundation Prize and the Unicredit Gifted Program Contemporary Arts Creators Project in 2014. Also, she was selected by Imagio Mundi Luciano Benetton Collection. She has been in group exhibitions in London and Wroclaw. She took part in a 60th Vasarhely Autumn Society exhibition in 2013 at the Tornyai Janos Museum in the Hungarian town of Hodmezovasarhely. Her work was also chosen by the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre in 2014.

The filmmaker Erika Kapronczai was born in 1985 in Szigetvar, Hungary. She lives and works in Budapest. She got her diploma with master degree and declared Master of Arts in Aesthetics at the University of Pécs Faculty of Sciences (PTE BTK) and another diploma with master degree declared Film and Television Director at the University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE) in 2015. Her first significant short film Well under the Sun has a premiere in Urania National Film Theatre in 2013. She directed an episode THREESOME in the omnibus film Meanwhile in Budapest what was distributed in the Hungarian cinemas in 2014 and 2015. She is a co-founder of the Dreampire startup project (www.dreampire.com) founded in 2013 and hold an exhibition in Galeri Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta in 2014. Besides she is writing her first feature film script she is working on documentary movies and also in the commercial field of moving images.