Transcript, 2023, drawing, alarm call of hundred birds, charcoal remains of burnt giant sequoia trees on paper, triptych, 185 x 450 cm, installation view: Coda, Einspach Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, 2023

The triptych represents in wave form the alarm calls of a hundred species of birds living in the forests of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The drawing was rendered by pieces of charcoal collected on the spot from the remains of the burnt giant sequoia trees which had reached an age of even 2-3000 years. Eighty-five per cent of the dense, old forests of the Sierra Nevada were destroyed or thinned drastically between 2011 and 2020. Fourteen thousand sequoia trees including many several thousand years old have recently burnt. There are no available data about the other, several billion plants and animals which have perished.

Transcript, 2023, detail, charcoal remains of burnt giant sequoia trees on paper

Transcript, 2023, detail, charcoal remains of burnt giant sequoia trees on paper

“Tamas Dezsö’s work focuses on the Sierra Nevada, a site of the California forest fires. The artist has transcribed the alarm calls of a hundred birds in the Sierra Nevada on his triptych, using remaining pieces of charcoal he had collected from the redwoods. The trees had lived for up to several thousand years but they burnt, so we may say more precisely that he transcribed them with the calcified corpse, the dead body of the sequoia trees, although the use of such words may seem unusual and sensational since they are not applied to other living beings apart from humans. Dezsö has committed to paper the sounds the birds can probably no longer make in many cases, because before they could do that the fire reached them at an incredible speed. The artist records by hand the wave forms made by bird voicesusing software, thus creating a personal, sensory relationship with the individual voices of birds.” Text by György Cséka, curator

Landscape, 2023 by Áron Birtalan, György Cséka and Tamas Dezsö, two-channel sound, electroacoustic composition for birdsongs, bird alarm calls and modular synthesizer, 10’05”

“These voices constitute the basis of the sound recording, through which they are transformed, distorted, mutated and become destroyed in and through the system of a modular synthesizer, namely a machine.” Text by György Cséka, curator

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, 2023, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 122 x 155 cm

“The photograph presents the top of a calcified sugar pine standing erect like a totem with relentless determination in the Sierra Nevada. It divides and cuts the picture into two and forces the viewer to be confronted and take a stand. Tamas Dezsö’s Coda aims to present and express with his own indirect means the non-human process of enormous ecological events, i.e. the darkness of the Anthropocene. After all, what cannot be represented and communicated is how several thousand birds parch into ashes in a 15-metre-high column of fire in a single second and how trees burst into pieces.” Text by György Cséka, curator

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, 2023, detail

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, 2023, installation view: Coda, Einspach Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, 2023

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California and Transcript, 2023, installation view: Coda, Einspach Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, 2023