Mozaik Euro-Med Art Hub Season 2 Episode 1
ART RESIDENCY PROJECTS | ONLINE EXHIBITIONS
IDENTITIES
| MOZAIK EURO-MED ARTHUB | SEASON 2 | Episode 1
The Documentary Film
The Journey of a One-Month Art Residency in the Heart of Nature, Culminating in an Exhibition at Károlyi Palace
This video chronicles the transformative experience of the one-month art residency organized within the MOZAIK Euro-Med Art Hub project, which brought together two visual artists from the Euro-Med region.
Streaming on YouTube:
I. INTRODUCTION
For the first time in the history of the Art Colony, we dedicated an entire residency to the art of animation—a medium that merges artistic vision with technical precision. Unlike static visual art, animation unfolds in time, frame by frame, requiring deep patience, craftsmanship, and digital fluency. It brings movement to ideas and breathes life into images, making it uniquely suited for exploring complex, layered themes like identity, impermanence, and transformation—the central focus of this residency.
We invited two animation artists, Kristina Laine and Sandrine Deumier, for a one-month immersive residency at the MOZAIK Euro-Med Art Hub. Set in a rural Hungarian landscape during the shift from winter to spring, the residency offered not only solitude and studio time, but also a dynamic, living metaphor for artistic and personal transformation. Emerging wild garlic in the forest, blossoming orchards, and the thawing of snow mirrored the inner landscapes both artists explored in their work. Arriving from Finland—still blanketed in snow—the artists were profoundly impacted by the sudden awakening of spring, which subtly informed their creative processes and themes.
The featured animations—one produced during the residency and one created beforehand by each artist—delve into identity’s transient nature.
Kristina Laine reflects on memory, perception, and impermanence through a poetic, dreamlike lens. Her digital 2D animation is a meditative visual poem, filled with shimmering light and delicate movement. She writes, “Like a fluttering, fragile butterfly— which one could both pity and admire; it will fly by in a flash of the moment. After all, we cannot stop time.” Her piece does not just portray change—it embodies it. Time, transformation, and impermanence are not only themes in her work, but the very material she sculpts with.
Sandrine Deumier, in contrast, takes a more visceral and existential approach. Her animation—built with digital layers of sound, imagery, and poetic text—is a raw exploration of mutation, adaptation, and survival in a fragmented, post-human landscape. Through lines like “We will mutate to survive…we will disappear without a sound”, Deumier captures a world where identity dissolves and re-forms in response to crisis, chaos, and inner rupture. Her piece is immersive, intense, and philosophical—an urgent meditation on the instability of self and the resilience of transformation.
Despite their contrasting aesthetics, both artists embrace the impermanence of existence. As Andy Goldsworthy once said, “The impermanence of my art is what gives it its power.” These works challenge Lewis Mumford’s claim that art “denies the reality of change and decay,” instead boldly affirming that change itself is a source of beauty, meaning, and artistic depth.
This residency was not only about production—it was also about intercultural exchange, reflection, and inspiration. It is part of ALFinMotion, the Anna Lindh Foundation’s mobility program that fosters cross-cultural artistic collaboration across the Euro-Mediterranean region. The MOZAIK Euro-Med Art Hub, hosted at the Art Colony, is an embodiment of this mission. So far, we have welcomed eight artists from the Euro-Med region, and we continue to expand our network.
During their stay, Kristina and Sandrine were immersed in a full spectrum of experiences. They were introduced to Hungarian and Middle Eastern cuisine, discovering how food carries stories, nostalgia, and identity. They engaged with Hungarian cultural heritage through museum visits and explored the legacy of animation at the “100 Years of Hungarian Animation” exhibition. At the Superdome in the Budapest House of Music, they experienced the frontiers of 3D visual storytelling, expanding their understanding of the medium’s possibilities. A highlight was viewing the animated interpretation of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which offered a vivid exploration of paradise, earthly temptation, and damnation—narrative archetypes that continue to inform modern visual storytelling.
The residency culminated in a public screening and mini-exhibition featuring both artists’ animations and a series of original framed illustrations. It was attended by an engaged local audience and marked a meaningful moment of exchange, conversation, and celebration.
This exhibition marks a milestone: the beginning of a new chapter where animation is embraced at the Art Colony as a profound and experimental art form. It affirms our commitment to supporting innovation, dialogue, and creativity at the intersection of art, technology, and cultural exchange. Through this residency, we are reminded that identity is not a fixed entity—it is something fluid, constantly reshaped by time, place, memory, and transformation.
This is only the beginning.
dr. Amir A. Abdi
Head of project
PUBLICATIONS
Download the exhibition catalog in PDF format (free).
II. Participating Artists
III. Exhibition Venue
KÁROLYI PALACE
IV. REFLECTIONS BY Kristina Laine
The vision is filled with shimmering luminance. Perception is a play of light. Like a fluttering, fragile butterfly -which one could both pity and admire; It will fly by in a flash of the moment. After all, we cannot stop time. So quickly flutters its wings….
Kristina Laine: Artworks Created During the Residency
Kristina Laine – The Cycle of Life (2025)
In The Cycle of Life, Kristina Laine offers a luminous meditation on impermanence through the medium of digital 2D animation. At just over two minutes long, the piece unfolds like a breath—a fleeting vision that resists fixity, embracing transience not only in theme but in form.
The animation is constructed as a nameless visual poem, a delicate flow of light and movement where no moment repeats. A still from the piece captures this atmosphere precisely: a fragile, translucent form floats against a soft, glowing backdrop. It could be a wing, a petal, or a dream—its identity dissolving even as we try to grasp it. The lines are faint, trembling. The light flickers, as if perception itself is caught between opening and closing.
Laine’s use of pale tones and minimal, almost weightless lines gives her animation a spectral quality. It does not depict transformation; it is transformation. Time, as both concept and material, shapes the piece—each frame a micro-gesture of emergence and fading.
She writes:
“Perception is a play of light.
Like a fluttering, fragile butterfly—
which one could both pity and admire.”
Indeed, this work flutters. It glows and vanishes. It reminds us that the most honest reflections on identity and life may come not from what we define, but from what we allow ourselves to witness, briefly, before it slips away.
Memories in the Clouds (2023)
Project Title (Original Language): Prisiminimai Debesyse
Project Type: Animation, Documentary, Experimental, Short, Other
Runtime: 7 minutes
Completion Date: June 28, 2023
“Memories in the Clouds” is a painterly, experimental animation that brings to life Kristina (Žičkutė) Laine’s childhood memories growing up in Soviet-era Lithuania.
Structured around a poetic narrative, the film gently weaves together thoughts and emotions, offering a child’s perspective during the turbulent decline of the Soviet Union.
Kristina’s voiceover guides the audience through fleeting recollections, much like a child imagining shapes in drifting clouds.
Created using a blend of summer sky time-lapse footage shot in Lithuania, volumetric 3D simulations, and digital 2D animation, the film also employs carefully tuned AI algorithms. These tools act as visual animators, shaping the clouds into scenes that reflect the narrated memories.
This work demonstrates how AI-driven visual technology can be creatively utilised to craft a deeply personal animated documentary, bridging memory, storytelling, and innovation.
V. REFLECTIONS BY Sandrine Deumier
since all hope is gone
we will mutate to survive
and pluck the stars from the sparkling snow
we will go inside the glow of fire
into the chaos we have traveled through
burning away in the wind
we will escape from ourselves
step by step
we will disappear without a sound
in the midts of savagery and lightness
as if nothing had happened.
This artist residency enabled me to work on a new digital animation project in ideal conditions, as well as to discover the city of Budapest and he Hungarian landscape.
On the edge of the wild is a short visual series about our relationship with the wild world in contemporary society, between myth and reality, fabrication and denial.
This work attempts to imagine the adaptation of wild species to human environmental modifications in an increasingly artificial future world. The question of the permeability of identities between human and non-human is the central issue.
Sandrine Deumier
Animation Artist
Sandrine Deumier: Artwork Created During the Residency
“On The Edge Of The Wild”
2025, Digital Animation, 5 min 30 sec
“On the Edge of the Wild” invites us to pause and reconsider the fragile and fluid boundary between the natural and the constructed, the wild and the tame, the human and the non-human. In an age where ecosystems are increasingly shaped—or disrupted—by human intervention, this visual series stands as both a poetic reflection and a subtle provocation. By navigating the space between myth and modern denial, the work gestures toward ancient archetypes and contemporary blind spots. It raises an urgent and philosophical question: As we reshape nature, are we also reshaping ourselves—and our sense of self?
The notion of permeability of identities between human and non-human challenges deeply rooted dichotomies. It echoes what Donna Haraway suggested in her Cyborg Manifesto—that the boundaries we take for granted (between organism and machine, or animal and human) are increasingly blurred:
“The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”
In a similar spirit, philosopher Val Plumwood, whose work addressed the erasure of the “other-than-human” in Western thought, reminds us:
“To deny our continuity with the natural world is to deny part of our humanity.”
This piece could also be seen as a response to the call made by David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, who wrote:
“We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”
“On the Edge of the Wild” therefore is not just a visual exploration—it is an act of reimagining the wild not as something distant or conquered, but as something entangled with us, something within. It suggests that the future of the wild might not only depend on how species adapt to us—but on how we allow ourselves to be transformed by our reconnection with them.
In addition to screening Sandrine’s latest artwork at the Károlyi Palace exhibition, a second animation artwork was also screened, created by Sandrine Deumier in 2023 titled “From the place where the light goes out” (HD, Stereo, 5min 45s, 2023).
“From the Place Where the Light Fades”
2023, Digital Animation, 5 min 45 sec
Drawing from real natural environments, this digital animation explores transitional landscapes that blur the line between the organic and the artificial. Guided by the idea of porous timelines and the shifting layers of geological terrains, the piece immerses viewers in a world that exists beyond human memory. It poses a central question: what forms of technological fiction can help reimagine the present and lead us toward sustainable futures?
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