“There was a girl
Singing
On the other side of town
She sang thousands of tales
Put together her hands
And started to sing her story
On the other side of town.”
Fekete Vonat: A Város Másik Oldalán
I can still remember the two beautiful girls from the juvenile detention home. We couldn’t understand why these arrogant bigmouth girls considered it important to remain virgins while the others made big bucks with prostitution. The explanation was perfectly simple, but it only became apparent for us when after reaching the age of majority they left the detention home and had to live alone. So one of them immediately became a prostitute, while the other went back home to her whore mother and months of quarrelling started between them. After a while the girl had enough and left her mother who later hung herself so the next time the girl could see her she was dead. The girl couldn’t sleep in the dark for many years after that.
Only after these tragedies we could understand why they wanted to remain virgins. And the reason was simple: they didn’t wish to be the “same” as the other girls with same fate, present, past and future. They wanted to be different. And since in the home everybody was a whore they could only be different if they weren’t. Their virginity wasn’t for a moral principle. And when they were out and could have started their different lives they gave in and became whores: what else could have they done?
(Based on the text by Géza Gosztonyi, former director of the Budapest Social Resource Centre, after the group exhibition Present Continuously 3 – Together – Living (curated by Gabriella Csizek) (2007). The photo series ‘Desires’ was inspired by this text.)
‘Desires’ is a project about young teenage girls, their hopes, their wishes and their dreams about future. The inspiration to the project was a story I was told of two teenage girls, who had had a dream about life; they wanted to be different. In ‘Desires’ I let these girls dream their dreams the way they wished them to be. And help them make their dreams happen.