Personal is Political – Stories Between Places
Lecture & discussion at tranzit sk
⬡ Lecture & discussion with Michaela Nagyidaiová
⬡ Moderated by Ana de Almeida
/ 04. 11. 2025 / 6 p.m. / tranzit sk / Beskydská 12, Bratislava /
This event is a part of The Resistant Archive exhibition and will be held in Slovak language.
Michaela Nagyidaiová’s lecture Personal is Political: Stories Between Places will explore questions of home, belonging, migration, and reflect on the ethical considerations of visual storytelling. She will also present Transient Ties, a personal project developed in collaboration with her grandmother, a work she has been creating over the past five years.
This two-part project explores migration, memory, and the evolving meaning of home across generations. It traces the journey of her grandmother, Lena, who fled northern Greece as a child during the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) and was relocated to former Czechoslovakia.
Part I, Transient Ties: A Sense of Belonging, reflects on her grandmother's forced migration and the shaping of identity in a new environment. Part II, Return to the Homeland, follows Lena’s return to her birthplace decades later, accompanied by two generations of her family. Through photographs, video, and archival materials, the project weaves personal and historical narratives, highlighting the fragility, resilience, and complexity of home, memory, and familial connection.
⬡ Michaela Nagyidaiová is a Slovak visual artist working between Vienna and Bratislava. Her work explores the intersections of landscape, memory, and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on migration and roots. Drawing from her background, she addresses issues affecting communities that she belongs to, highlighting overlooked social, political, and historical concerns across the region. Nagyidaiová examines how ideologies and politics shape everyday life, family, and one’s native environment.
Working primarily on long-term, personal projects, she draws inspiration from both historical and contemporary events, combining photography, video, archival materials, and text. She graduated with an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication in 2019.
Find more information about M. Nagyidaiová on her website here.
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ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.
This project has been supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS) and the Austrian Cultural Forum Bratislava.
Project has been supported by public funds provided by the Slovak Arts Council.
The Bratislava City Foundation supported the project under the original title Collective Archive.
Media partners: Artalk.info, Flash Art CZ & SK, Kapitál, GoOut.net
