The Dice Man
"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 notes of 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 two eight-sided dice, leading him district by district, from one location 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."
I want to return to the long-abandoned family home, to stand one last time before the vast windows overlooking the Danube, the see the golden reflection of sunlight. The view has returned in my dreams since childhood—a silent city in dazzling light, but its gray buildings are swallowed by an endless flood.
I was born in that apartment. One of my earliest memories is of my father standing by the window, gazing at Gellért Hill, at the clouds. Within those walls, where my childhood began, his life ended—when I was seven, he lost his battle with cancer. A year later, my mother died on the icy Route 6, on her way to Pécs with my birthday presents. They told me she had to stop somewhere because of the heavy snow. A few days later, when the family gathered, they told me the truth. I didn’t cry. My tears had already run dry when my father left.
That was when our new life began in Pécs, with my brother, at our grandparents’ house. Everything before that now feels more like mythology than memory. In 2005, at eighteen, an orphaned young adult, I returned to Budapest—"home."
Since then, everything has been about this experience—the anxiety it left behind, the thousand branching paths of "what if," divine randomness. The understanding that the most I can do is try to give it meaning. Everything I have created since has been driven by the tension between apparent chaos and the sacred order I long to glimpse behind it. I search for God, or for the final proof of His absence. Or maybe I have simply fallen in love with the search itself. A part of me remains a child, believing that if I search long enough, someone—or something—will finally tell me why things happen the way they do.
I have no choice but to embrace the cold uncertainty I have spent my life trying to interpret—through art, through play, through intoxication and sobriety alike. Carrying my sad-beautiful inheritance, my nightmares, and memories perhaps never truly existed, I surrender myself to chance as I spiral down into my beloved, secret city.
Let my favorite things accompany me—the morning mist, the sunlight filtering through the bus window, and the people I love so much. Let the streets my mother once sketched in ink surround me, the gnarled black winter trees frozen in my father’s black-and-white photographs, and the images from his time as a diver—foreshadowing his final descent.
Let chance once again draw my path, as it always has.
