INTERVIEW WITH ANNA ÁDÁM: "THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO LIBERATE OURSELVES"

Hungarian Dipló (HD): You are a Hungarian artist, author, community activist, and cultural entrepreneur. You are the founder and director of the School of Disobedience, co-founder, artistic director, and choreographer of the Gray Box company (France), founder of the Performance Now! Festival, as well as the creator, curator, and producer of the Radical & Experimental Performance Nights series. Your artistic practice is vast, spanning performance creation, crafting sensitive hybrid spaces, and community building. What are you bringing to 1111 Gallery? Will your residency have a specific focus?​

Anna Ádám (A.A.): My seven-month residency is structured around four closely connected activities: research, creation, education, and community building. The research will primarily focus on performance art. Think of it as an open, creative platform or experimental laboratory with thematic workshops in the form of performance nights, which people can join through open calls. The creation aspect refers to preparing a new performance. Starting in November, I will be working on a duet combining text and dance, where a dancer and an actress navigate the challenging journey of confronting and reconciling with their personal pasts. The gallery will serve as my rehearsal space, but there will also be open sessions and work-in-progress presentations. For education, the gallery will become the headquarters of the School of Disobedience—a radical, critical, and experimental performance art school. I will hold classes, house presentations, public lectures, and host all the free satellite programs dedicated to amplifying marginal aesthetics, voices, and visions in the spirit of the school. Lastly, community building will involve collaborative events, both artistic and non-artistic. For instance, the third Performance Now! festival, organized this year in collaboration with STEREO Művház and AGORA Community, will be co-created by students of the Art Theory Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Another example is the first Contemporary Poetry Biennale in spring, which will also emerge from close collaborations with partner institutions.

HD: You view the School of Disobedience, which extends relational aesthetics with a pedagogical framework, as a milestone in your artistic career—almost like an artwork itself—despite its lack of a physical or visual form. You refer to it explicitly as a piece of community art. Yet its roots seem to draw from Black Mountain College, Bauhaus, radical and critical pedagogy, and the aesthetics of underground political movements. How does your often critical, radical, and institution-challenging rhetoric align with the gesture of moving into a beautifully renovated white cube in Budapest’s 11th district for seven months?

A.A.: The fact that I have a strong opinion about academic education doesn’t mean I avoid collaborating with higher art education institutions. Similarly, I believe I can be critical of institutional systems while remaining open to cooperation. To me, being radical doesn’t mean stubborn exclusion or rejection—it means voicing disagreements where necessary. I don’t believe that everyone has to agree on everything, nor do I think the world would be better if only schools like mine existed. Some people prefer academia, while others resonate with my school. That’s completely okay.
I strive for a pluralistic approach where diverse viewpoints coexist harmoniously. I believe we can learn a lot—perhaps even more—from our differences than from surrounding ourselves with like-minded people. My actions emphasize the importance of dialogue and collective thinking. It may require more effort and present bigger challenges, but I believe it offers greater rewards and opportunities for growth.

HD: That’s a significant statement in a politically polarized country where ideological differences often sever family ties, friendships, and professional collaborations. From what you’ve said, it seems acceptance and embracing other perspectives are central to you. Are you creating spaces in 1111 Gallery where difference isn’t a problem but an opportunity for individual and collective growth? This idea also aligns with your research on differentiation. Could you elaborate on that?
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A.A.: Yes, embracing, understanding, and accepting differences are crucial in the spaces I create. My works often explore inner or outer conflicts arising from embracing otherness and difference. Secret Garden delves into internal struggles, Right for Fight explores duel in the context of a love relationship, and Utopia/Dystopia depicts the unequal battle between an individual and a global phenomenon (climate change). My new performance, which I’ll develop at the gallery, will revolve around the conflict between confrontation and evasion.

HD: Conflict is clearly a central theme in your research. At the same time, you wrestle—literally. In 2023, with support from the French Institute, you spent an extended research trip in Senegal, learning local wrestling techniques. Your performance Right for Fight draws from this movement vocabulary. You also run the Feminist Fight Club, where you strengthen self-confidence muscles in a female community. Yet, your spaces are not combative—they are “soft and sensitive, accepting and inclusive, open and empathetic,” as you write. How do you ensure that? What makes a space safe?

A.A.: I believe a space becomes safe when it has a clear framework that is transparently communicated. Participants should know they are entering a creative, non-therapeutic environment. While I often engage with personal themes and draw inspiration from somatic, sensation-based methods, I maintain a clear distinction between artistic and therapeutic contexts, deliberately avoiding explicitly therapeutic approaches. I also ask participants to respect this, ensuring the space remains a professional or creative context where explicit trauma should not be brought in. Unfortunately, in the past 5–10 years, artistic and therapeutic spaces have become increasingly conflated, leading to blurred expectations. I dislike terms like queer or safe space because they’ve been overused, diluted, and lost their political significance. Simply labeling something as a safe space or putting up a sticker doesn’t make it so. Creating a truly safe space requires hard work: establishing boundaries and fostering open communication. My programs constantly work towards building such an environment—one where you can genuinely be yourself because, in my view, liberation is only possible under these conditions.