Space Focus Budafok, Budapest Friday 23rd September
Art Quarter Budapest is a building that provides studio and event space for creative enterprises. Located 20 minutes by bike from the centre of the city it forms an island of art and design within a barren wasteland of industry and suburb. I meet with the co-director Wolfgang Bartesch to talk succinctly about his vision for the spaces and feelings about the political climate in Hungary as a whole. Up on the roof of the building we can see the main city in the distance, and building sites all around us.
JC: So Art Quarter Budapest is pretty much on its own here as a creative space? WB: We are an island in an industrial area of this district. There is another studio house in the neighbourhood but I think totally by coincidence because the lady who’s running it is in the cultural business in Hungary for ten or more years, her father owns the property so I do not think that she moved here because we are here. So you feel that it’s quite an insular thing on its own in this area, there’s not a big creative scene here. I think the creative scene in the area is concentrated on our project. And you think that it’s close enough to the city for the exhibition tomorrow night [a performance of the 4D Spatial Sound Institute along side another Atelier’s exhibition] to draw a lot of people? I hope so but I know that the distance to the city centre is an issue. I think it’s a bigger problem here than it would be in other cities. I used to live in Berlin and I think there to travel 10km within the city is not an issue. In Budapest, especially for Hungarians, not for foreigners, it’s really difficult to get people out here. Even though the public transportation is excellent, actually the infrastructure is very good. But there are so many programmes in the city centre that people are just too lazy to come out. And the bike path as well that I came on. It could be better. I think it’s actually done very badly. As long as you’re next to the river it’s nice, you too often have to cross big streets so you can’t just go. I don’t know why they did it that way because the path next to the river is big enough. But bikers are not a priority here, maybe later.
I know that there’s a lot of empty buildings in Budapest as a whole, I was told maybe 40%?
There are a lot of empty industrial buildings, but I think the reason that they are empty is that people who own them are still waiting to make a decision of what type of development to be. So spaces like this are still important, you can’t just say I want a studio and go and find a space. No I don’t think so. I read that at the moment there isn’t an issue with spaces developing too fast and changing the area. That things are progressing at a good speed? I think that is something that happens more in the city centre. For example this area with construction has not caught that movement yet. And what about movement in and out. The people who have studios here, are they generally Hungarian businesses or do people come into the city from outside? We tend to have artists working here, they live in Budapest and come out here to work. When we have spaces we rent out to companies and they use the space as workshops and offices. We prefer companies from creative fields.
Art Quarter Budapest
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