Tamás Kaszás was born in Dunaújváros, Hungary in 1976. He lives and works in Horány (Szentendrei Island) near Budapest. He graduated from the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where he is currently enrolled as a PhD student. In this short video Tamás Kaszás speaks about the topics he is currently dealing with, such as collapse and survival, self-sustainability and autonomy, folk science, fictional anthropology, and the conflict between theory and practice. He describes some artworks and a “hobby-project” -as he calls it- of his, and the large scale installation; Amphibian by the ex-artists’ collective – a currently renewed collaborative form with Anikó Loránd.
The works appearing in the video are preparations for a general ecological and social collapse. Kaszás collects objects, practical solutions and knowledge in the present to serve as strategies for surviving after that fictive future collapse. With these preparations, he not only gains and acquires knowledge about things like shelter-building, famine food, or re-usage of objects, materials and folk-science, but he also build those into his everyday life and practice.
In the video Kaszás explains his relation to the audience and to institutionalized art, the inner paradox which lies between his art and its’ appearance in art institutions, his strategies to live in and live from these structures.
His exhibitions, installations, different collaborative projects are all part of a bigger research, and some of the advices, modules and prototypes indicated by them can be equally reused in his own personal life, in the current capitalist society and in the preparation for a future collapse. These advices are based on developed, fulfilled and established solutions, the utilization of folk science, creative inventiveness and the acquirement of these strategies. However this knowledge serves not only as a preparation for a fictive future, but also to be more autonomous in the present society.
