WHAT IS THIS FUNDRAISER FOR?
To open up this beautiful grungy space in the heart of Budapest.
In Hungarian it will be called ‘A HELY’ (or ‘The Sunview B’, in English).
We’ve set up a little fb page so come be friends (we aint done anyhting here yet but will when we start up). https://www.facebook.com/Sunview-B-108686157255558/
WHAT IS … A HELY?
A members-run art venue AND community space — meaning it will be both theater AND soup kitchen, artist’s residency AND meeting house, cinema AND meditation center — while always being a friendly neighbour.
Most of all A Hely is an approach, a system of doing things differently, a place for people to come together that has a foundation of free expression with zero financial gain.
WHAT ISN’T A HELY?
A business. There’ll be no buying or selling anything in the space. All events will be free and people bring their own food or drink — along with whatever the lovely host provides.
WHAT GOES ON AT A HELY?
Fellow artists and community minded people become members, who do in the space whatever type of thing they want.
On the art side, members and their friends play music, show films, dance, perform, sit and write their life story … then do a live reading of their life story … then perform the opera version of their life story …
The community minded members host dinners, give free courses in anything they know about — like carpentry or horticulture or hypnotism, hold cultural events and activist meetings, guide day-long meditation sits …
It’s about whatever brings people together. In that vein the space will also be open as a residency for artists from around the world, and provide meals once a week for those who need them.
SO WAIT, HAS THIS THING ACTUALLY STARTED?
Absolutely! Here’s some of the ways, 9 to be exact:
1. MEMBERS
Our goal over the next year/year and a half is to have 35 local members paying small monthly dues to cover monthly rent and upkeep, but we already have 3 of them — even before opening — so we are WELL on our way!!
This VERY diverse group are:
MEMBER 1: A therapist who’ll hold meetings here with her colleagues around their volunteer work, holding mentalization sessions at kindergartens.
To see their amazing volunteer work visit: https://www.hogyvagy.hu/?lang=en
MEMBER 2: An activist and organizer who works for the local district government. She will use the space to plan events centered around the Jewish community.
MEMBER 3: A venture capital investor by day who teams up to make music with a graphic designer by day, running under the name JADE PURE. They will perform their yet-unfinished new electronic album here in January.
He’s been on hiatus from music for sometime but to hear earlier tunes: https://soundcloud.com/booklovemusic
2. PERFORMER AND WORKSHOP LEADER
On February 25th we’ve got coming a multi-faceted performer from Berlin, Hans Kellett (who plays the Pompidou this month!) to not only perform 2 evenings of queer poetry and cabaret, but also run 3 days of workshops on social intervention.
More of Hans can be seen at: princessinhans.de
3. OFFICIAL OPENING: PERFORMANCE AND FILM
December 8th is the A Hely official opening, where co-founders (and married couple) St. John and Anna will unveil their new work, ‘Homemade Mouthwash’, a reenactment of an actual event which happened in the space.
For their previous collaborations, ‘The Yes/No Experiment’ and ‘Afterbirth’, see: https://www.stjohnmckay.com/performancetc
Also at the opening filmmaker Tim Travers Hawkins, stopping in after showing his feature documentary about Chelsea Manning at the Watch Docs festival in Poland, will present a preview of his new feature documentary, which is about the weird world of psychometric testing.
Here’s an interview with Tim: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/23/chelsea-manning-director-shes-a-kind-of-punk-rock-figure-for-me)
4. ART RESIDENCIES
1-2 week, free-of-charge residencies will be offered in the space for 1 artist at a time, with about 6 throughout the year. The plan is to start these mid-2020, once A Hely is fully settled in and prepared. We, the co-founders, have contacted art residency programs/organizers in countries we have lived, but plan on reaching out to other regions as well …
THE US:
https://www.artistcommunities.org/starting-residency-program
THE EU:
https://www.transartists.org/about/contact
AUSTRALIA:
https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/international/residencies/
NEW ZEALAND/ASIA:
https://www.creativenz.govt.nz/about-creative-new-zealand/contact-us
https://www.asianz.org.nz/arts/
5.SOUP KITCHEN / INTERCULTURAL PROGRAMS
Originally we wanted to offer up the A Hely space to the organization, ‘Heti Betivo’, which runs weekly soup kitchens out of restaurants around Budapest. Unfortunately A Hely’s kitchen is not industry standard (we can’t make 130 meals a week!). So we will independently undertake making meals for those in need one afternoon a week starting January/February — just on a far smaller scale!
But then we also found ‘Mira’. A fantastic organization that offers a range of intercultural programs for refugees like mentoring, learning, and social meetings — such as Syrian immigrants cooking for their neighbors. We have contacted them about using A Hely as a space for such dinners (or whatever they choose), as it is in the A Hely spirit of not only community, but diversity and resistance. This spirit is necessary in Budapest, unfortunately, as the Hungarian government is very extreme in it’s policy on allowing in zero refugees and ‘non suitable’ (read as you will!) immigrants. We hope to have a weekly event with Mira starting in January/February.
Mira’s website: https://artemisszio.eu/mira/en/mit-kinal-a-mira/#_mentorprogram
6. SIMILAR LOCAL SPACES
We are a block away in each direction from two really amazing similar venues, both of which we are in contact with and who support the opening of our space (one even just gave us all the wood for building our kitchen!):
Golya is a large, much-loved art and community space that’s been a Budapest staple for years, is run as a collective, and is doing all the things we’ll do — just on a bigger scale.
Check their amazing project out: http://golyapresszo.hu/?lang=en_us
The other, Mersz Klubb, is a tiny but awesome little social club that is dedicated to low key, avant-garde events, and is like walking into someone’s living room when something weird is going on.
Learn about their mission (translate page!): https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersz_Klub
So we’re in a fantastic neighborhood, perfectly placed to be the mid-sized space!
7. VIPASSANA MEDITATION CITY-CENTER
Co-founder St. John has been on 3 separate Vipassana, 10-day, silent meditation retreats. Vipassana Hungary does not have a center in the city, so A Hely has been offered as a venue for holding one-day sits, once a month, starting in March/April.
8. MANY PEOPLE ARE VERY INTERESTED IN USING (BUT NOT ABUSING) A HELY
Rappers, visual artists, poetry slammers, vegan chefs, dancers, writer/directors, musicians of all stripes — you name it, we’ve got a line up of incredibly diverse, interested people wanting to use the space once doors open! Filling the calendar shall not be a problem in this weird, hip, old world city, where people definitely prefer watching a poet live over a Pixar movie!
9. THE FIRST BABY STEPS OF A HELY
Co-founder St. John left his comfy New York life and hopped on a plane to start a community space and be broke in Budapest with co-founder Anna.
The co-founders found a perfect spot on Szeszgyar utca (translates as ‘Alcohol factory Street’ — if ya can believe it!), in Budapest’s very exciting 8th district: 70 sq. m bathed in southern light, secured for 3 years.
The co-founders met the neighbours and the building manager, and found the closest hardware store.
The floor became blue and the walls got much whiter.
Curtains have been installed, after 3 days of heated debates on their positioning.
BUT IF IT’S NOT A BUSINESS … HOW WILL IT RUN?
It’ll work kinda like a social club. In the long game, enough community minded people and artists become A Hely members, each giving small dues each every month to cover rent and upkeep and anything new needed for the space, who can then book any free day on the A Hely calendar for any kind of event they can dream up. We just need help getting it off the ground while we find those beautiful members.
Here’s the highly scientific chart explaining the members system — the gang at NASA made it for us:
UM, CAN THIS WACKY, NON-CAPITALIST WAY OF DOING THINGS ACTUALLY … WORK?
Totally.
The two co-founders of A Hely actually met in a place, The Sunview Lucheonette, that has been thriving on just this kind of non-business system for almost a decade — in New York City even, the very core of capitalism’s dark, icy heart. And now they are growing the anti-capitalist system internationally, hoping for it to spread everywhere!
BUDAPEST … GOOD FOR THIS?
Take a former communist country and then run it with semi-fascism, and you’ve got a place of complexity, resistance, cheek, and chutzpah, with people who are all for doing things the other way. Though unique, A Hely has no shortage of brother, sister, and cousin venues around the city, and hopefully the Hely model can inspire more places to run the same way. We may be humorous in our approach but this is very seriously about fighting the power, brothers and sisters and non genderists.
WHO’S RUNNING IT?
A Hely will be a collective, fully co-run by the members.
But the two founders, curators, and rent-check-hander-overers are:
WHERE’S MY MOOLA GOIN’?
In a nutshell: setting up and keeping this place going until we’ve got enough members to cover renting and upkeeping the space.
There’s looots of work to do and loooots of gear and furniture to get before the doors of A Hely can be swung open: Painting walls and putting down new flooring and making rooms soundproof and building a new kitchen are the things we gotta do first. Then it’s buying all the furniture and rugs and lights and plants (lots and lots of plants) to fill the four rooms, as well as a workbench and tools. And then it’s getting all the electronic equipment, a projector and a screen and wires and adaptors, and a record player, and all the audio stuff like an amp and a mixer and microphones and microphone stands … all the stuff needed for people to do whatever the hell they want. And yeah, it’d be lovely to have a cheap old run down piano in here some day … and, since we’re a couple of zealously eco-minded, egg-eating vegans, maybe a couple of solar panels and a chicken … #dreams.
But we want to do it right. Not expensively, just right. We want the place to look beautiful as well as feel beautiful. So people can come be beautiful … mostly on the inside, but if they feel like combing their hair and putting on their fanciest duds, then on the outside too.
By the way, anything received is not seen as a donation — but people joining in on a mission to do things differently, and in the creation of a truly free space.
Creating and coexisting with another human being can be rough, so, sure, things get bumpy at times, but luckily we share the same vision and commitment. Now it’s about convincing others to come commit with us! If we don’t make funding we’ll still do A Hely, it just won’t have all that’s needed for a long time, which will be a bummer — people may get tired of watching filmmakers telling their movie instead of showing it, or sitting on the rugless floor not listening to music, while eating raw food. But we are in 1000 percent, come what may. We also need to make sure to stay in a good relationship with the neighbours, so we can’t encourage naked karaoke nights in front of the space (at least not in winter). But for happy people around us we are installing serious soundproofing, so everyone can use their vocal cords as they please once inside A Hely. So yeah, it’s all a huge risk, but we believe in this members-run space so very, very much, and know it can be realized since we met at the Brooklyn Sunview — which was not just our favourite place in New York City, but so many people’s … and it WORKED.