Máté Bartha – Anima Mundi
‘The primary function of a book is to recreate the author’s ideas in the reader’s mind’. So writes librarian and curator Paul Dijstelberge in the introduction to Máté Bartha’s Anima Mundi. With no other accompanying text or captions, Bartha’s grids of images – all of them shot in urban environments – act, collectively, as a kind of cryptograph. Their function, however, is not to encrypt Bartha’s ideas for the reader, but to set out an order that bridges the natural and the synthetic – a collective grammar specific to the modern metropolis, devised by no-one, but legible to anyone, shaped by human hands but no longer under human control. Máté and Eugenie spoke online early in 2025.
Eugenie Shinkle: Before we start talking about the book I wanted to ask you about your work more generally, and your interest in using images to explore philosophical topics. Can you tell me a bit more about how you came to work this way?
Máté Bartha: I’ve always been fascinated by what images mean—how they transform into symbols and become part of a personal mythology. This interest has shaped my approach to photography from the beginning, though I’ve only recently begun reflecting on it more consciously.
In Anima Mundi, the focus was on this act of meaning-making itself. I was drawn to Renaissance codexes by figures like Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher, where playful analogies serve as a method for understanding the world. Their work resonated with me because it merges poetic and aesthetic association with a structured, proto-scientific search for knowledge, something that is very much the essence of being human. Like my earlier photobook Common Nature, Anima Mundi uses the metropolis as its canvas, but while Common Nature was more emotional and intuitive, Anima Mundi adopts a systematic, observational stance, treating the city as a vast, enigmatic structure governed by strange, implicit rules to be deciphered.
In my current projects in development, I continue to explore this interplay between play, structure, and meaning, but with a more personal, introspective dimension. I now employ play and oracle-like methods not just as creative strategies but as tools to catalyze and examine the process of meaning-making itself. Photography, for me, has become both a game and a form of divination—a way to construct and decode my own myth, while also confronting personal history and trauma through this evolving, symbolic world-building.
ES: I’m reminded of one of my favourite lines from Michel Foucault’s book The Order of Things, where he talks about the way that pre-Enlightenment knowledge was constructed: ‘In the vast syntax of the world, the different beings adjust themselves to one another; the plant communicates with the animal, the earth with the sea, man with everything around him.’ Your work seems very much aligned with this idea of resemblance as a mysterious force linking things together.
MB: This approach could be called holism: the idea that every element of the world exists within a larger whole, each fitting into the other. In the post-Enlightenment, science-driven structure of knowledge, holism became just one method among many. But as Foucault points out, for thousands of years, it was the only conceivable way to understand the world—it wouldn’t have made sense otherwise. It’s not necessarily about how different elements (inanimate objects, birds, stars) interact, but rather how their existence is analogous. How the secrets of one can be understood through another.
The title Anima Mundi points to Plato’s concept of anima mundi – a fundamental force of nature, an intelligence without a face, animating and connecting all things.
This is an intuitive way of thinking, much like how a child grasps complex ideas like birth and death through more accessible concepts—sleeping and waking, day and night. But beyond that, it raises a deeper question: why is the world structured like this? The title Anima Mundi points to one of the earliest answers to this question. Plato’s concept of anima mundi refers to a fundamental force of nature, an intelligence without a face, animating and connecting all things. Over time, this intelligence was given faces—gods, spirits, higher entities—whose stories humanized and mythologized the original idea, making it more approachable. The Enlightenment marked the moment when this holistic way of seeing the world—living its last golden age in the practice of alchemy—was pushed aside in favor of specialized disciplines like physics, philosophy, and theology. Only much later, with the discoveries of modern physics, did a form of holism resurface.
But what fascinates me more than the cultural history of defining reality’s laws is the mere assumption that such a thing is possible at all. That there exists an intelligent order—outside us, hidden from us—yet one we believe can be understood, even mastered. To me, this is like trying to catch one’s own shadow.
Our perception of the world is determined by what we are. Reality appears to us as if we were looking into a mirror—not necessarily because someone or something made it that way (though that possibility can’t be ruled out), but because it is the only way we can make sense of experience. We had to shape the world into something we could comprehend in order to survive and adapt. Don’t get me wrong—I’m far from an evolutionist or a materialist in this matter. This could just as well be a grand hallucination, or one’s dream in which we are many. But no matter how hard we try to pull ourselves above it by our own hair, we always end up standing in front of a mirror, seeing a familiar face in the patterns of creation.
ES: To return to Foucault – he claimed that the Enlightenment also marked the end of this holistic way of knowing and understanding the world, and the emergence of the grid as a general configuration for knowledge. Given this, it’s interesting to note the way that the grid appears throughout the book – within many of the images, and as an overall organising principle that persists even as the content of the images themselves becomes more chaotic in later sections. Were you conscious of this superimposition?
MB: The grid is a key visual element throughout both the material and the book. For me, it symbolizes human intellect—projecting itself onto its surroundings and observing them in detail, as grasping the whole at once would be impossible. From the Ancient Egyptians, who used a grid system to standardize human proportions in paintings and reliefs, to Ptolemy, who mapped all known places within a grid of latitude and longitude in his Geography, to the way cities are planned, or how a chess or Go board can serve as an allegory of entirety—the grid has long been with us, helping to rationalize the fluid and organic nature of the world.
But beyond framing, describing, and measuring, it is also a means of collecting, comparing, and creating—from drawing grids used by artists since antiquity (reaching a golden age in the Renaissance with the advent of linear perspective), to the periodic table of elements, and its influence in art, from Muybridge’s motion studies to the Bechers’ typologies and Gerhard Richter’s structured compositions. In my photos, the grid appears in various forms—as a shadow projected onto a human figure, enclosing it; as a typology of “V”-shaped sky sections visible from different streets of the city—standing as both a metaphor for the grid’s ability to find order and beauty in unexpected places and as something that in a way limits us.
The grid is a key visual element throughout both the material and the book. For me, it symbolizes human intellect—projecting itself onto its surroundings and observing them in detail, as grasping the whole at once would be impossible.
As an organizing principle in the book’s layout, the grid emerged from two directions. First, the material existed as an exhibition before the book, though it was always conceived as a book. The first solo show of Anima Mundi (TOBE Gallery, Budapest, 2022) was created with Emese Mucsi, curator at the Robert Capa Contemporary Center for Photography and my partner in formulating the concept of the material. Together, we aimed to evoke the atmosphere of a pseudo-scientific studio or an alchemist’s lab by mirroring the aesthetics of my actual studio at that time, with hundreds of small, square-format, black-and-white copy shop prints taped to the walls, constantly rearranged. In the exhibition, we preserved this layer, hanging framed fine-art prints over them.
At the same time, I was already in conversation with Carel Fransen (The Eriskay Connection, Dutch publishing house). As a cartographer, he immediately connected with my vision, bringing new and unexpected ideas—such as the book’s format, cover, and the use of a grid throughout the pages, which, while present in the exhibition, I hadn’t imagined as a book element before. In this sense, the book itself functions as a map, marking not just what is known but also the temporary and the unseen—echoed in the black squares on its pages, reminiscent of how I would flip images on my studio walls to hide them without removing them entirely.
And as a last aspect: the book begins and ends with sheets of monochrome Ebru (traditional Turkish paper-marbling) endpapers, created by artist Orsolya Takács. In this regard, it serves as the context for all these grids: a metaphor for the nature of reality, fluid and organic endlessness, waiting (or refusing?) to be sliced and diced.
ES: Turning now to the photographs themselves: certain forms, or typologies of forms, appear repeatedly. We encounter simple forms like circles and spheres, rectangles, triangles and grids, along with more complex arrangements of objects and human figures (particular variants of pose and gesture, for example, recur throughout the book). Are you conscious, when you’re shooting, of looking for these typologies and symbols, or – following the principles of divination – do you allow them to reveal themselves to you? To quote Baudrillard: does the map precede the territory, or is it the other way round? Or a bit of both?
MB: The map precedes the territory, and I think it was the making of that map that interested me. As we discussed before, the way we interpret phenomena cannot be separated from what we are. From the infinite formations of the world, we humans have identified only a handful, which we use as building blocks to describe reality. One might argue that these shapes and constellations are the observable foundations of material reality (sphere, diamond, wave, etc.), but we have no way of knowing how these observations would change if they were made through different eyes, a different brain, comprehended and structured by a different mind.
Take, for instance, the diagrams (early infographics, perhaps?) of Robert Fludd. In Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617), particularly Anima Mundi, he organizes every aspect of the world within a disc. The further we move from the center—occupied by Simia Dei, God’s Ape (the human, mimicking its creator)—the more we ascend, layer by layer, from the mundane to the celestial. Everything fits neatly within this circular structure because it feels right to do so. In other cases, Fludd explains the movement of celestial bodies using musical terms, a thought that goes back to Pythagoras, who argued that the same mathematical ratios that govern music also regulate the heavens. I believe science itself is, at its core, an aesthetic endeavor, and this focused, creative thinking plays a major role in all discoveries. One only has to look at quantum physics to see that observation itself alters the observed.
I deliberately sought out basic, archaic shapes in my surroundings. The twist was that I treated the metropolis as the contemporary counterpart of nature. Where a philosopher once contemplated the ebb and flow of the sea, we now contemplate traffic signs.
But rather than delving deeper into that, let me actually answer your question. I deliberately sought out basic, archaic shapes in my surroundings. The twist was that I treated the metropolis as the contemporary counterpart of nature. Where a philosopher once contemplated the ebb and flow of the sea, we now contemplate traffic signs. This is our natural habitat—just as mysterious, if not more so, than a jungle. The second chapter of the book catalogs these fundamental shapes and patterns, while the third presents staged arrangements of them, imitating the (visual) experiments of my fictive scientist—the imagined author of the book. When this impersonation arranges, for example, the aforementioned V-shaped sky sections, the aim is to highlight the aesthetic aspect of scientific thinking—presenting something that makes no practical sense yet still attempts to uncover the unknown.
In the following chapters, the human figure—or rather, the patterns formed by human figures (society)—is observed and arranged in the same way as inanimate objects and shapes were before, attempting to understand them through the system previously established. The book then zooms in on the individual, as if observing a colony of termites, before finally expanding its scope to a cosmic scale—again borrowing from my Renaissance sources. The final images map the movement and structure of celestial bodies and formations, yet they are constructed from the same urban visual raw material.
ES: You’re getting ready to exhibit the work again at Fotofestiwal, Lódz, in June 2025. Given that the work has always been conceived as a book, what are some of the challenges you face when installing it as an exhibition?
MB: That is correct and I can’t be more excited about it. After its exhibition in Montpellier at the Boutographies Festival, this is going to be the largest one for Anima Mundi ever since, one with the highest visibility. It is a huge honor to be selected for the main, curatorial program of Fotofestiwal, which means that people are actually interested in this kind of complex, philosophical, maybe a little hard-to-approach type of photography. This wasn’t obvious at all for me through the 4 years of research and production of the material. Finally the book, again, thanks to Mesi and Carel, encompasses all of that fruitful ambiguity that (hopefully) makes its secrets intriguing to uncover. But for sure this requires a level of trust and patience from the viewers side. What is different in an exhibition form is that we’re able to create a space that instantly overwhelms the viewer with that atmosphere of clandestinity. At this point I would rather not go into details describing the exhibition of Anima Mundi in Lódz, but I can say that we’re going to use a variety of tools and sources of inspiration to take the viewer by the hand on this unusual visual investigation.
Máté Bartha
The Eriskay Connection 2024
