Interview by Erika Giulietti
All Images © Máté Bartha
Máté Bartha (1987) is a Budapest-based visual artist working in photography and documentary film. His practice seeks to reenchant the world through world-building, personal mythologies, and symbolic readings of urban space. He holds Master’s degrees in Photography and Documentary Filmmaking and is currently a doctoral student at MOME. His projects include Kontakt (Louis Roederer Discovery Award, Rencontres d’Arles, 2019), Anima Mundi (Les Boutographies Main Jury Prize, 2024), and the ongoing The Dice Man.
Erika Giulietti (EG): Before moving into the broader questions surrounding your practice, I would like to begin with The Dice Man, a project that seems to bring together many of the themes that recur throughout your work: memory, mythology, the city, and systems of chance. Could you introduce the project and explain how this journey through Budapest began, and what role the dice, photography, and personal history play within it?
Máté Bartha (MB): The Dice Man is an ongoing photographic and literary project that began as a year-long, algorithmic pilgrimage through Budapest, the city where I was born and where I lost both of my parents as a child. Guided by childhood drawings, inherited family photographs, recorded dreams, and a pair of eight-sided dice determining direction and distance, I walked through all 23 districts of the city in an attempt to reclaim space, memory, and a sense of belonging.
The dice transformed the metropolis into an oracle, turning wandering into a ritual of chance, interpretation, and discovery. Through photographs and texts, the project explores how cities, images, and games can become tools for navigating grief, uncertainty, and personal mythology.
The work is closely connected to my doctoral research at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), The Photobook as Play-Object and Oracle, which investigates how photography, play, and divinatory systems can open new ways of understanding reality.
(EG): It was fascinating to explore your work. Thank you for being here and for this opportunity. Chance determines your route through Budapest, yet the project feels deeply intentional. How do you balance surrendering control to the dice with your own emotional and narrative instincts, especially considering that Budapest is also your hometown?
(MB): This is a question I’m asked quite often, probably because the project shares several characteristics with conceptual art. What becomes interesting is not necessarily the final artwork itself, but the thought process and the system behind its creation.
I’d like to mention a Hungarian artist, András Wolsky, a graphic artist who, several decades ago, carried out a project in Budapest in which he used dice to determine which direction to take whenever he reached an intersection. Although his work also combined the city and dice, it differed significantly from mine. His interest lay primarily in the graphic image of the path generated by the process, and the process itself, less in the possibilities of its interpretation. I would describe that as a distinctly conceptual approach.
My own practice is much closer to ancient systems of divination and oracle traditions, which are central to my research. Those systems rely on a conceptual structure for interpreting signs, but they always require an interpretative process afterward.
Interpretation is inherently subjective and deeply intentional. In ancient times, when a king or ruler consulted an oracle, the act was never neutral. It was tied to political decisions and concrete intentions. Divination, in that sense, is always both intentional and subjective, only that my intentions are very personal, emotional. That’s precisely how I approach this project. The dice provide the system, but afterward I spend a great deal of time reflecting on the results.
I wouldn’t describe it as surrendering control. On the contrary, I see it as an attempt to gain control through the process. If I had to associate it with a particular artistic approach, I would describe it as narrative, or performative rather than conceptual. What matters most to me is what happens while I’m making the work: what I experience, what I think, and how the entire process transforms me. That performative dimension lies at the very heart of the project.
(EG): You describe the project as an ongoing journey through grief, memory, and the city. Since it’s an evolving work, has your understanding of Budapest changed more than your understanding of your personal history, or are those two dimensions inseparable?
(MB): There are two aspects to my relationship with Budapest, and both changed during this project. The first concerns my relationship with the city itself. That transformation happened mainly through the walks. I wanted to create new stories for myself, discover unfamiliar places, and experience the city on a different scale. I’ve walked through every district and almost every area of Budapest, and doing so gives you an entirely different perception of its dimensions.
You begin to understand physically how much larger the suburban areas are than the city centre. I realized that I spend most of my life within a very small portion of the city—probably no more than ten percent—while vast areas of Budapest function in completely different ways. I also developed an intuitive understanding of how these different parts connect to one another. It’s not something you learn by looking at a map; it becomes embodied knowledge. You find yourself standing somewhere and thinking, “Last time I came through here by bus,” or “The shopping mall is over there, the cemetery is there, and the metro station is just beyond.” By spending so much time walking, I gradually placed myself back inside the city—not through childhood memories, but through my own present actions. I wanted to make Budapest my home again through active engagement, rather than simply accepting it as the place where I grew up. In a sense, I rebuilt my relationship with the city and allowed myself to call it home again in a new way.
The second aspect concerns my own story: the story of my parents and of my brother and me becoming orphans. That relationship changed much more after the project was completed, exhibited, and published. I suddenly found myself telling the story over and over again. I had to explain how my father died, how my mother died, what I experienced as a child, and everything that followed.
For more than thirty years, this had remained almost a taboo. I’m nearly forty now. I’m no longer a child, yet experiences like these can remain unspoken for decades because they are not the sort of things people introduce themselves with. No one says, “Hi, I’m a lawyer,” or “I’m a doctor,” and immediately adds, “By the way, this is what happened to my family.” And yet, despite remaining largely unspoken, it is probably one of the defining parts of my identity.
Writing and speaking about it so frequently finally gave me some distance. I began to see it as a story—as a narrative. I could examine it from different perspectives and eventually recognize its value. I could ask myself whether there was something to learn from it, or something that others might learn as well. In many ways, this project truly functioned as a form of therapy.
(EG): That naturally brings us to the next question, which concerns the photobook itself and your doctoral research. Your doctoral research introduces the idea of the photobook as both a play object and an oracle. What possibilities emerge when a photobook becomes something readers can interact with, rearrange, or even consult, rather than simply reading from beginning to end?
(MB): Alongside my interest in books functioning as oracles, I’m deeply interested in games and play. One of my greatest influences comes from role-playing games, where books play a fundamental role. A clear example is the Fighting Fantasy series, in which you read as the protagonist and, at certain moments, choose how the story continues by turning to different pages. More broadly, role-playing manuals always carry the promise that opening the book means entering an adventure—a journey. Those are precisely the qualities I would like to bring into this project.
My research is not about claiming that I invented the oracle function of books. Rather, I argue that books have always functioned as oracles; we simply haven’t described them in those terms. If we compare traditional divinatory books such as the I Ching (The Book of Changes) with other culturally significant books, striking similarities emerge. The I Ching stores its symbolic system within a book. But the same can be said, in different ways, of the Bible, an encyclopedia, or even a travel guide. Each performs an oracle-like function. My research is therefore primarily comparative. Let me give you a few examples, works of contemporary artists, where these qualities are especially tangible.
In Thinking Like an Island by Gabriele Chiapparini and Camilla Marrese, the reader almost becomes the curator, actively creating connections between the images. The participatory dimension is immediately apparent. I would compare Gábor Arion Kudász’s Middle to Thinking Like an Island. The book includes a set of photographic stickers that readers are invited to place throughout the pages themselves, making them active participants in constructing the work.
The other two books—Peter Puklus’s publication and Holy Bible by Broomberg & Chanarin—operate differently. Peter Puklus’s book is relatively slim, yet it presents an elegant universe composed entirely of his own imagery. Each return to the book reveals something new or invites a different reading of the same images.
The same is true—perhaps even more so—of Holy Bible by Broomberg & Chanarin. It’s extraordinarily dense work. You don’t experience it by reading from the first page to the last. Instead, you open it at random, spend time with a few pages, close it, and return to it later from another point. Every encounter becomes a different experience.
These are all oracle functions. What I’m trying to do is bring these mechanisms together, compare them, and understand how they operate. Then, in my own book, I may incorporate one of them—not all of them, but perhaps the one that best serves the project. I’m deeply interested in this particular dimension of books. I genuinely love books—not only photobooks, but books as objects in themselves.
(EG): All three projects seem to transform ordinary urban spaces into places filled with mystery and imagination. That was certainly my first impression when I looked at the photographs and read the descriptions on your website. Do you see these projects as different chapters of the same ongoing attempt to re-enchant the city? Could they be considered siblings?
(MB): Yes, absolutely. Although I only became fully aware of it when I began my doctoral research. By then, Anima Mundi had already been completed, while The Secret Life of External Units—which is actually a much shorter project—was still in progress. Sometimes you need the perspective of five or ten years to understand what you’ve really been doing.
The city is my natural habitat. It’s the environment in which I live, as it is for so many people. That’s why it matters to me—not because I want to make a sociological statement about urbanism, but because this is simply my world. That’s the universe that surrounds me. As for the idea of re-enchantment, yes—that is exactly what interests me. Fantasy role-playing games are often understood as a form of escape into imaginary worlds, but that’s not how I see them. For me, their value lies in bringing something back from those worlds. You take a small piece of that magic and carry it into everyday life. Each one invites you to choose something around you—or even something from your own past—and see it differently. The Dice Man is about memory. The Secret Life of External Units revolves around a single ordinary object. In each case, the invitation is the same: to adopt a more magical perspective and incorporate that element into your own personal mythology, simply because doing so makes life richer, more playful, and more meaningful.
Psychologically, I think that’s a very healthy capacity. The ability to imagine reality from another perspective—whether that perspective comes from literature, history, fantasy, or games—is valuable. These projects are simply one way of exercising that ability.
(EG): Anima Mundi invites viewers to search for hidden structures and invisible systems within the metropolis. Do you believe photography can create new mythologies rather than simply document reality?
(MB): I actually believe the very idea of reality is already a myth. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial statement. Anyone who has studied photography or documentary filmmaking at university quickly learns that there is no such thing as objective reality. There are only points of view. Photography has always been an extraordinarily effective tool for shaping reality—or, more precisely, for presenting a particular version of reality as though it were reality itself. Of course, that has never truly been the case. Photography is certainly a technical and chemical process, but from the very beginning it has also been used to manipulate perception, influence opinion, and support political, ideological, and cultural narratives.
For that reason, I don’t think photography has ever simply documented reality. If someone consciously uses photography to create myths, I actually see that as a very honest way of working with the medium. Today, virtually any image can be generated. As a result, photography will increasingly lose its role as proof of reality. It has become obvious that any image can exist.
In fact, I believe AI may ultimately have a liberating effect on photography, much as photography once liberated painting. When photography emerged, painters no longer had to devote themselves to reproducing reality as faithfully as possible. That task had been taken over by another medium, allowing painting to become more subjective, expressive, and experimental.
I think photography is now entering a similar phase. In five years—perhaps even sooner—people simply won’t care very much whether an image was produced by AI or by a camera. Photography will gradually shed the expectation of faithfully representing reality. Instead, it will be valued for the ideas, narratives, emotions, and mythologies it is capable of creating. I find that possibility incredibly exciting.
(EG): One of the most unexpected protagonists in your work is the external air conditioning unit. What draws you to these overlooked elements of the urban landscape, and what do they allow you to express that more traditional photographic subjects cannot?
(MB): The best way to answer that is by telling the story of how this project began, because it was by far the most spontaneous work I’ve ever made.
About five years ago, my girlfriend and I wanted to install an air conditioning unit in our apartment because the summers were becoming unbearably hot—and, of course, every year they seem to get even hotter. While planning the installation, we discovered there were endless practical questions: where to place the external unit so it wouldn’t disturb the neighbours, would function efficiently, and would comply with architectural regulations.
As a result, whenever we walked around the city, we found ourselves constantly looking at other people’s air conditioning units. We’d point at them and say, “Look at that one… what about this one?” Eventually it became a game. We started talking about the units as though they were creatures—or birds. We’d say things like, “Those two must be friends,” or “That one looks lonely,” or “That’s an old one,” “That’s a young one.”
At some point we also began photographing them with our phones simply because they amused us. Human ingenuity can be surprisingly fascinating. People install air conditioners in the strangest places. Some are positioned in completely absurd locations, others are hidden in unusual ways, and some are painted to blend into different surfaces. There are endless inventive solutions.
One day I came across an open call from HAPAX Magazine. They were looking for projects that had never been published because the artist considered them too silly, or too strange to be taken seriously. I immediately thought, “This is exactly the project I should submit.”
It was already late at night. In about half an hour I assembled a PDF using those terrible phone photographs and wrote a humorous text pretending I possessed mysterious knowledge about air conditioning units. The whole thing was completely improvised. I sent it off, and they loved it. That was the first positive response the project ever received.
Only afterward did I begin treating it as a proper photographic project.
(EG): You mentioned that the project started almost as a joke. Humour quietly runs throughout your work, even when you deal with loneliness, anxiety, and our relationship with the built environment. How important is playfulness when addressing subjects that are ultimately quite existential?
(MB): First of all, humour makes everything more approachable. Perhaps that’s also why the AC project appealed to you the most. Whenever something contains humour, people connect with it differently. If something makes you laugh, you’re naturally drawn toward it.
One interesting discovery for me was that The Secret Life of External Units zine and Anima Mundi were published almost exactly at the same time. While Anima Mundi represents roughly five years of work, the other project took only about six months to complete. Yet, whenever I attended a photobook fair, I found that I could explain its concept in just thirty seconds. I would simply say, “It’s about air conditioning units,” and everyone immediately understood. With Anima Mundi, on the other hand, I needed an hour or more (or at least it felt as much) to explain the references to encyclopaedias, Renaissance thought, classification systems, and everything else. Humour makes a project immediately accessible.
The second point concerns play itself. Play is another central aspect of my research. One of the thinkers who has influenced me the most is the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, author of Homo Ludens, one of the foundational books on the study of play. His central argument is that play is one of the fundamental pillars of human culture. Culture develops around play. You can recognise playful structures in art, law, war, poetry—virtually everywhere.
So I wouldn’t say that play is merely useful for making art. It’s already present. The real question is how aware an artist is of it: how consciously they can recognise those playful structures, articulate them, and ultimately use them to strengthen their work.
(EG): Let’s return to The Dice Man. The project remains ongoing, even though it has already been published in multiple forms. Do you imagine it eventually reaching a definitive conclusion, or are openness, possibility, and the continual rewriting of the journey fundamental to its nature?
(MB): There will eventually be one definitive version, but at the same time it has already been published twice in different forms.
The first publication was designed by Zoltán Szmolka. It took the form of a fold-out map that functioned almost like a brochure for the first exhibition. Visitors could take it home free of charge. It worked both as a map and as a guide to the exhibition itself.
The second publication was designed by Tommaso Parrillo of Witty Books, following my participation in the Futures Metamorphosis exhibition and the Exposed Photography Festival in Turin. That publication also emerged quite spontaneously. Originally, we had planned to present the work only as an exhibition, but Tommaso suggested a different approach. He said, “Why don’t we create an experimental publication instead?”
At first, the idea felt a little strange. I was already working toward what I considered the definitive book, and suddenly I found myself producing these smaller, provisional versions along the way. Gradually, though, I began to enjoy that process.
Once again, it reminded me of fantasy role-playing games. You often have one central universe accompanied by magazines, manuals, expansions, and different editions that people can collect. I started thinking about these various publications in exactly the same way. They’re all tools for world-building.
So even though there will be a final version there may well be other temporary publications if the project continues to be exhibited. I’ve come to enjoy that process. Rather than thinking about a single book, I now think in terms of many books. That feels like a natural way of building a fictional universe—or something very close to a fantasy world.
