The Dice Man (project in progress)

"I want to return to the long-abandoned family home, to stand one last time before the vast windows overlooking the Danube, watching the golden reflection of sunlight." This longing is at the heart of The Dice Man, a photographic pilgrimage shaped by memory and chance. Supported by the Budapest Photography Grant, Bartha Máté’s project is a deeply personal reckoning with the loss of his parents at a young age. Through the remnants they left behind—photographs, drawings, diary entries, and recurring dreams—he embarks on a journey across every district of his hometown, using these fragments as a guide in an attempt to construct a personal mythology standing at the boundary of past and present. His journey unfolds as a game dictated by the roll of a die, leading him from one district to the next. At each location determined by chance, he creates images inspired by his archival materials and the dreams he has recorded since childhood—dreams in which a silent city is swallowed by a flood, or where he roams endless corridors in a dark apartment block. In his own way, he searches for meaning in what has happened, weaving new connections between scattered memories, using the city as an oracle to uncover patterns in the seeming arbitrariness of fate. The journey culminates in the long-sold apartment where his childhood began and his parents' lives ended—tracing the invisible threads that forever bind our memories to the places where they were born. "Let my favorite things accompany me—the morning mist, the sunlight filtering through a bus window, and the people I love—while I submerge myself in my secret city. Let chance draw my path once more, as it has been with me from the very beginning."