Part of the transdisciplinary focus Rural–Urban Relations. 

Becoming Peasant is a mesmerising journey through desolate yet fertile musical worlds that never existed, but still sound familiar. It’s a rare treat to hear Éva Bárdits’ and Márton Bertók’s duo perform live: together they inhabit Iza Tarasewicz’s large-scale installation in Trafó’s Main Hall, entangling vernacular and electroacoustic soundscapes.

“Becoming peasant is a never-ending process through which folk consciousness, after being tilled by the culture industry, is fertilized into an ancient landscape. Deep in this primeval barren live magical undead creatures, unable to recall their past and destined to never have a future. The flower of their catatonic mourning must be uprooted and consumed by the peasant-to-become to provide them with soft vitality.” (Gondozási Központ)

Gondozási Központ (Care Center) is a duo formed by Éva Bárdits (Aires Altos, Trutat, Holnaplányok) and Márton Bertók (Triglav, Verekedés a 19. században, Parasztok Atmoszférában), active since 2022. Their music combines experimental improvisation with communist propaganda. Their 2023 debut album Becoming Peasant takes the music industry’s exploitation of folklore as its starting point to deliver a critique of the capitalist culture machine. Its strange and compelling collages, at once ethereal and unsettling, blend elements of Hungarian folk music with industrial soundscapes: delicate rustling follows distorted effects, layered with half-remembered, slowly dissolving fragments of folk songs. 

Inspired by the thinking of Mark Fisher, Becoming Peasant also suggests that if we want to imagine the end of world music, we must first imagine the end of capitalism:
“Hands up who wants to give up their anonymous suburbs and pubs and return to the organic mud of the peasantry. Hands up, that is to say, all those who really want to return to pre-capitalist territorialities, families and villages. Hands up, furthermore, those who really believe that these desires for a restored organic wholeness are extrinsic to late capitalist culture, rather than in fully incorporated components of the capitalist libidinal infrastructure.” – Terminator vs Avatar by Mark Fisher, 2012