Pandemic time becomes a lens on uneven vulnerability and the Hungarian state’s securitarian scapegoating, prompting a turn from compromised institutions toward extra-institutional, care-based cultural infrastructures that treat representation as a material condition of survival rather than a symbolic add-on. Grassroots art practices (OFF-Biennale, PAD, News Medley, Péli/RomaMoMA) are framed as counterpublic, feminist, and decolonial/anti-ethnographic interventions that retool visibility, authorship, and collective memory—while insisting that emancipatory projects must also confront their internal contradictions (gendered labor, the male gaze) to sustain a plural, non-national “collective body.”

Pandemic temporality and constrained circulation become a frame for poetry as social document and collective address, foregrounding carceral grief, worker testimony, and the ethics of reading as a mode of solidarity rather than aesthetic consumption. Indigenous critique of colonial display and Adnan’s phenomenology of time converge on a poetics of receptive listening—cross-genre, event-score, and philosophical lyric—insisting that wonder and attention remain inseparable from historical injustice and political unrest.