PROUD & TORN

"Proud & Torn: A Visual Memoir of Hungarian History", is an animated, digital timeline that tells the story, across time, of a Hungarian farming family who, as serfs, worked the land of the Carpathian basin and both prospered and foundered under the economic conditions and political decisions of “great men” in power. The story of this rural Hungarian family—a “nobody” family— is a refreshing critique of Hungarian nationalism, the dominant narrative of Hungary. Narrated by the American daughter of a Hungarian émigré, the work contains over 1,000 photographs, maps, graphics, and looping flm clips that together create a rich tapestry of visual storytelling controlled by the user via horizontal and vertical parallax scrolling that continuously anchors back to the beautifully layered and interactive timeline interface. Proud & Torn stylistically combines the genres of timeline, photomontage and graphic history and celebrates amateur photographs. As such, the work is setting new standards for what is possible through historical texts in terms of visualization and the reinterpretation of history.