Niagara Worms, for a Better Life
Niagara Worms, for a Better Life brings into dialogue two generations of Hungarian migration separated by more than sixty years. The project intertwines the story of a family member who fled Hungary after the suppression of the 1956 Revolution with the experiences of a contemporary generation leaving the country amid the increasingly polarized political climate of the Orban era. By allowing these narratives to intersect, the work reflects on the recurring nature of migration, asking how political circumstances continue to shape personal decisions, family histories, and ideas of belonging.
The first narrative follows Tóni, a university student living in the dormitory of the Budapest University of Technology, one of the centres of the 1956 Revolution. Following the Soviet invasion, he escaped to Austria before eventually settling in Canada. Like many refugees arriving with little knowledge of the language or local society, he accepted physically demanding work to establish a new life. His first job was collecting Canadian nightcrawlers on golf courses around Ottawa—an occupation that, to this day, remains a source of income for many newly arrived immigrants. Invisible to relatives in Hungary, who imagined the "successful Canadian uncle" bringing chocolates and cigarettes from the West, his years of uncertainty and manual labour became an overlooked chapter in the family's collective memory.
The second layer of the project shifts to the present. Rather than focusing on political exile, it considers the quieter yet significant wave of emigration that has characterized Hungary over the last decade. Growing political polarization, the erosion of democratic institutions, and an increasingly restrictive cultural climate have led many young professionals, artists, and academics to establish their lives elsewhere in Europe. This contemporary story is embodied through curator Sári Stenczer's move to Berlin. Before leaving Budapest, she sold her apartment and distributed many of her books, personal belongings, and everyday objects among friends. These dispersed possessions appear in the series, becoming traces of an absence produced not by a single historical event but by a gradual transformation of the social and political landscape.
Through photographs documenting a long-awaited family reunion in Canada and repetitive moving images reflecting temporal patterns, the two stories become inseparable. The Canadian nightcrawlers—first encountered through Tóni's work—occupy the objects left behind by the new generation of emigrants, creating unexpected encounters between memory, labour, and displacement. A video repeats a single moment of Niagara Falls 30,000 times—the approximate number of worms that could be collected during one night's work—transforming repetitive labour into a temporal monument. Water, embodied by both Niagara Falls, becomes the project's central metaphor: a force that connects places, carries memories across generations, and dissolves the boundaries between individual biography and collective history.
Rather than presenting migration as an exceptional event, Niagara Worms, for a Better Life reveals it as a recurring condition in modern Hungarian history. Through family archives, inherited stories, lost objects, and contemporary traces of departure, the work explores how political change is experienced not only through public events but also through intimate acts of leaving, remembering, and beginning again.
2019
