Biography

We, Eszter Dobos and Napsugár Trömböczky, started to work together during our applied theater studies in 2020, based on our shared curiosity about community, research and play. 

Our projects are experiments of applied theater, new ways of participation, socially engaged arts and non-hierarchical creation. We design and offer creative situations in which participants can present their stories themselves, with the tools they choose, formulated in their own aesthetics. We believe that involving non-professionals in the artistic process is not only a tool of self-understanding or representation but also introduces refreshing aesthetics and transformative perspectives to the contemporary art scene. Therefore we look at the creative process as part of the artwork itself,  connecting local communities with (the beyond-human) neighborhood. 

Our works span across various disciplines and media, always allowing the research to find its most fitting and final form. So far our projects range from performative brunch series and community exhibition to hydrofeminist walk-lecture performance and score-based game.

Artistic project

Abyssal Sip is a participatory public space performance presented as a water tasting event. With a small audience, we sip into liquid archives, discovering unique taste profiles of medicinal and thermal waters, uncovering hidden notes of nostalgia, and perhaps the aftertaste of a bitter history. This project is the latest iteration of our long-term engagement with hydrofeminist theory, transforming philosophical research into community-centered experience.

Adopting the aesthetics and language of post-Soviet institutional and cultural heritage, we step into the role of overly enthusiastic water-bureaucrats attempting to rebrand water as national treasure. The histories of wells reveal our ever-changing relationship with the land and the economies built around. Through their stories, tastes and molecules, waters appear as medicine, poison, product, quencher.

Playing with the contrast between the formal genre of professional tasting events and the ritual of drinking together, the performance explores the somatic possibilities of tasting and the intimacy of encountering an unfamiliar taste.

In Europe, the climate crisis manifests through water: droughts, floods, pollution. Abyssal Sip attempts to make this urgency tangible. We explore ecological aesthetics in urban space, creating a post-Cartesian atmosphere. Through speculative embodiment, we blend nostalgia with beyond-human kinship, offering a familiar yet future-centered multilayered experience.

Format: water tasting lecture performance

Size of audience: up to 30 people 

Specific location: by a (natural) source of water (drinking fountain, well etc) or thematically relevant site (water bottling factory, etc.)

Timing/duration: 60 minutes performance, possibly performed 3-4 times per day