A fine-tuned TTS (text-to-speech) machine narrator, pre-trained for emotional emphasis, delivers the text with an atmosphere-creating objectivity. A generative model also participated in the design of the title typography. The source material for the book objects and mail art works is a group of documents found in a handbag — the papers of Margit Halász — discovered by one of Bátai’s friends in the empty attic of his newly purchased house in Kaposvár.

The fictional stories shaped around the found objects partly draw on the artist’s own life experience and those of fellow artists, while speaking to us all with a more universal resonance. As the artist states in his ars poetica: “The pages of H. M.’s library and the objects of mail art have become a memorial to the human fate in East-Central Europe since the mid-1990s, and they recall the history of all of us, our universally valid framework of destiny. Book objects and mail art works. In the homeland of the grotesque, the written traces of our becoming faceless and our vulnerability simultaneously bring to mind the worlds of Örkény and Kafka.” Source: Sándor Bátai: Book Objects and Installations, private edition, 2025.

The literary tradition of the grotesque and the absurd appears as a cinematic form. The narration draws a mosaic-like family story organized through the soundtrack — Fiume, Rudabánya and Sztálinváros — in accordance with the genesis of the artwork ensemble, while the visual world also draws on stop-motion and undercrank techniques. Scenes recorded at a lower frame rate run at 50 fps, producing a time-compressed, slightly staccato movement. The figure of Margit Halász appears through hybrid editing, partly built from documentary sources and partly from constructed elements; the objective presentation of documentary materials acts as a counterpoint to the animated sequences.