Video: Following the Removals / January 16, 2020 by Kate Browne

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A Cocoon Miskolcon 2019. július 27-én, szombaton alkonyatkor a számozott utcákon átmenő menettel csúcsosodott ki. A lakók és a korábbi lakosok a környék különböző pontjain kezdték meg a sétát, ahol az embereket kilakoltatták, és az otthonokat lerombolták. Lámpásokkal, amelyek mindegyike egy-egy család nevét viselte.

A menet resztvevöi a 7. utcán találkoztak, és együtt mentek vegig rajta, a megszállt és kiürített otthonokon lógó nagy fekete-fehér portrék között. Aztán kerekeken gurították a Cocoon-t amit epitettek rövid távon, egy kis füves részre a Szinva folyó partján.

Az emberek a lámpákat a Cocoon belsejébe lógatták, a örökségről készített fényképek, a kilakoltatási értesítések, a kanadai elutasitott nem repülőjegyeket és a számozott utcákon a boldogabb időkről készült családi fényképek mellé.

Az elhangzott mondatok az interjukbol kiragadt részletek, amelyekben történeteket osztottak meg a költözés előtti, utáni és utáni életéről.

Cocoon Miskolc culminated with a procession through the Numbered Streets at dusk on Saturday, July 27, 2019. Residents and former residents began their walks at various spots around the neighborhood where people had been evicted and homes razed. They carried lanterns, each of which bore the name of a family now gone.

The various groups of marchers met on 7th street, and together walked down the block, between large black-and-white portraits of residents hanging from occupied and emptied homes. Then they wheeled the Cocoon they had built a short distance, to a small grass lot on the banks of the Szinva River.

People hung the lanterns inside the Cocoon, next to photographs of heirlooms, eviction notices, rejected plane tickets to Canada, and family photographs from happier times in the Numbered Streets.

The soundtrack played excerpts of their own interviews, in which they shared stories about life before, during and after the removals.

Building a Cocoon in the Numbered Streets / December 17, 2019 by Kate Browne

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A 8. es egyben utolso utam a Szamozott utcakba 2019 juliusaban volt. Az interjuk kesz voltak es egy-egy kiemelt reszletbol hanganyagot szerkesztettem hogy a Cocoon-ban lejatszam. Eljott az ideje a szobor felepitesenek.

Elkezdtunk dolgozni az egyik haz kertjeben a 7. Utcaban. Egy utcanyira, a 9. Utcaban egy kotró a varos megbizasabol egy ujabb haz bontasat fejezte be. Elkezdtunk osszeszerelni faágakat 12 kulonbozo meretu karikává amikbol a szobor fog allni. Ez napokig tartott, majd egymasba helyzetuk oket hogy kialakuljon a szobor.

Ez egy time-lapse video az alkoto csapatrol, a kornyek osszes lakojarol.

Kovetkezo posztom egy video lesz a körmenetröl amiben a helyiek elsetalnak a hianyzo csaladok es baratok lebontott hazai mellett a Cocoon-ig, amit mi mindannyian helyeztunk ki a Szamozott utcak egyik sarkara a Szinva patak melle.

My eighth and last trip to the Numbered Streets came in July 2019. All my interviews were done and I had edited excerpts into a soundtrack to play inside the Cocoon. It was time to assemble the sculpture.

We began working in the side yard of a house on 7th street. One block over, on 9th, a backhoe hired by the city was finishing the demolition of yet another house. We began by lashing together saplings into 12 rings of various dimensions that comprise the sculpture. That took several days, then we put them together to form the Cocoon sculpture.

This is a time-lapse of the assembly by the project team, all residents of the neighborhood.

Coming next I’ll post a video of the procession that took residents past the sites of the destroyed homes of absent friends and families to the Cocoon they had built, which we all wheeled to a small site at the edge of the Numbered Streets, on the banks of the Szinva River.

“I Miss Everything About Hungary” / December 5, 2019 by Kate Browne

To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments. — John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

A partial view of the abandoned Diósgyőr steelworks, once the economic engine of Miskolc and even the country. Beyond, the houses and apartment buildings on the western edge of the the city and the Bükk Mountains.

A mother talks about leaving Hungary forever

I lived forty years in Hungary.
I gave birth to four children over there.
My parents passed away over there.
We are seven of us, brothers and sisters.
I miss them very much all my sisters and brothers who are in Hungary.
I cannot go to the cemetery to see my parents,
and I miss that a lot too,
and I miss everything about Hungary.

But over here I can keep my children safe,
and over here I see a future for us.
So over here my children can become somebody, and they are not going to be treated differently because of the race difference.
Nobody’s going to hurt them. We can have a calm normal life.

So I know my children are going to be safe over here as long as I live.

We were sitting in her Toronto kitchen eating the chocolate palacsinta (Hungarian crepes) she had just made when she said this. She and her family fled the Numbered Streets as the evictions and demolitions began. They moved to another neighborhood in Miskolc, to evade city inspectors and the risk their children would be taken away by authorities. Then they sold their furniture and other items to buy plane tickets to Canada, where they recently received their permanent residency status.

Looking east on Vasgyári út, Iron Foundry Street, the central street in the neighborhood. July 23, 2019, just after 5:30PM.

Photographs and video by Eric Etheridge.

COCOON Miskolc: Following the Removals / November 6, 2019 by Kate Browne

This is the sixth performance installation of Cocoon, my series on migrations.

On July 27, 2019, the people of the Numbered Streets walked through their neighborhood carrying lanterns, one for each family the city has evicted and whose home has been razed. People gathered at the Cocoon, hung their lanterns inside, illuminating… — On July 27, 2019, the people of the Numbered Streets walked through their neighborhood carrying lanterns, one for each family the city has evicted and whose home has been razed. People gathered at the Cocoon, hung their lanterns inside, illuminating the sculpture, and then they listened to their own histories of life before, during, and after the removals.

Removals and Demolitions

This summer I completed my sixth Cocoon installation in the Numbered Streets, a neighborhood in Miskolc, Hungary. Miskolc is an old city in the country’s northeast, a center of steel-making since the 19th century, and like most steel towns one that has fallen on increasingly hard times.

For generations Hungarian-Roma families have lived in the Numbered Streets and worked in the plants. In 2014, the city government, controlled by members of Fidesz, the country’s ruling party, began to evict them and destroy their homes. The city’s publicly-stated goal was to renovate its football stadium and expand parking, and it framed the project in the predictable phrases of urban renewal: “Do you support the elimination of slums in Miskolc? There must not be slums in the 21st century in Europe.”

But their real agenda seemed clear. Destroy the neighborhood, and drive the Roma from the city. Playing to old hatreds of the Roma paired nicely with their party’s anti-immigrant fervor. By the summer of 2019 half the houses in the neighborhood had been destroyed, and though the new stadium had been open for some time, the city was continuing to evict and raze.

One resident who watched the city destroy her home described it to me. “They started to pull everything down. There were some small legal houses in the yard and they started to demolish them, to pull away the roofs, to pull away the doors. Then they started to demolish the big house. They pulled up all the fruit trees from the yard, I could not do anything. I couldn't guard my house.”

Before: The Numbered Streets in 2010, before the removals started. 100 quartered-flats — 100 houses, 400 flats. Roma and non-Roma lived together here for generations, many working in the nearby steel mills.

After: The Numbered Streets in 2018. The new stadium with a new parking lot and empty fields where 20 houses once stood. Through the summer of 2019, the city continued to evict Roma as they could, and tear down homes far from the stadium, as the red… — After: The Numbered Streets in 2018. The new stadium with a new parking lot and empty fields where 20 houses once stood. Through the summer of 2019, the city continued to evict Roma as they could, and tear down homes far from the stadium, as the red rectangles — destroyed and partially destroyed homes — throughout the Numbered Streets indicate.

Working in Hungary

I made my first trip to Miskolc in 2017, and multiple trips over the next 2 years. I conducted more than 80 interviews for this Cocoon with current and former residents of the Numbered Streets, including some who now live in Canada.

I was always happy when I was in the Numbered Streets. I loved talking with people through the big casement windows that opened onto the street, and looking at their many family photos of ancestors and descendants. Some streets were so beautiful with massive, ancient trees that scattered their yellow-green blossoms on the street. Here there was a fleeting memory of my childhood as I watched kids ride their bikes under these trees.

Especially in the summertime, with lilacs, trumpet vines and concord grapes, the Numbered Streets reminded me of where I grew up, in central Pennsylvania. My father was an engineer who worked for Bethlehem Steel, first in Steelton, until his part of the plant shut down in the early 1960s, and then in Williamsport. Many of the people in the Numbered Streets reminded me of the close-knit families of friends and neighbors from my childhood who through hard work and generosity made a community.

But everytime I returned I noticed more destruction and fewer people. The grief and trauma on the faces of the people who remained was evident. Some Roma who lost their flats managed to squeeze in with family elsewhere in the neighborhood. Others moved elsewhere in Miskolc, or to a settlement just north of town. Some went to Budapest. Some families fled to Canada. Others sold everything and tried to fly to Canada, only to be turned back at boarding gates in transfer cities, like Paris and Amsterdam.

The city kept on with its grim business. Officials carried out frequent door-to-door checks of identification papers against leases against addresses.

“We didn’t want them to take our kids,” a father told me, explaining why and his family had risked the trip to Canada. They had made it, and secured permanent residency status. “If you don't have a mailing address and a house, foster care comes and takes your kids.”

*Above and below: flats and homes in various states of demolition.*

*Once a building’s remains were carted off, bulldozers scraped the ground flat, then spread new topsoil that had been trucked in.*

Please stay tuned

I have a lot more to share about Cocoon in the Numbered Streets over the next few weeks. In addition to more stories and more photos, I’m finishing up a video of the procession and illumination which I will post soon.

In all the previous sites I’ve built Cocoons, the stories I’ve collected centered mostly on the ongoing repercussions, years and decades later, of intense historical traumas — slavery in the MIssissippi Delta, colonialism in the Goutte d’Or neighborhood of Paris. Working in the Numbered Streets was different. Here it was as if the old trauma had been brought back to life; not an echo of the past, but the deadly thing itself.