Virág Szálas-Motesiczky

A Hungarian girl dreams about the arrival of the Hungarian euro

A Hungarian girl dreams about the arrival of the Hungarian euro

There are moments when objects meant to represent stability begin to dissolve, revealing not certainty but rupture. A coin, stripped of its function, becomes something else, a hollow emblem, a relic of agreements deferred or abandoned. It occupies a liminal space, where the future it was meant to guarantee never fully arrives, yet its absence lingers. In places where economic sovereignty is both fiercely defended and quietly eroded, such symbols accumulate weight. The promise of alignment with larger systems hovers at the periphery, invoked when convenient, dismissed when threatening. The mirage of transition is sustained by rhetoric rather than inevitability.

Elsewhere, history folds back on itself in the form of old emblems repurposed for new narratives. Symbols that once spoke to myth, kinship, and movement are seized, rebranded as markers of endurance. The falcon, once a legend, now signals a fixed identity, a reinforcement of national edges. Yet, like the structures it decorates, it shifts, absorbing the ideology of those who claim it. Meaning does not solidify, but bends, at times a tool of defiance, at others an assertion of control.

In the silence of emptied value, a paradox emerges: the less an object functions as intended, the more it reveals. The de-tuned coin, an act of conceptual estrangement, magnifies these fractures while engaging with national folklore and subjective narratives.