The forerunner of the Simon Jolán Ensemble was our art group Body Sweats, which was founded in 2015 and takes its name from a work by the early American avant-garde Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. By exploring the oeuvre of Jolán Simon in 2017, we discovered the Hungarian roots of this tradition, and the name change was a result of this.

We are mothers living the typical Eastern European situation of ‘career or child’, ‘earning money or creating art’, who, having had artistic qualifications, have left creative work for a longer period of time and now find time for it alongside work and family responsibilities.  Our aim is to create critical, experimental, performative and ephemeral works, mainly through community collaboration between women with children living in different parts of the country.

Creation is the event for us when we do not want to conform or meet any expectations, because we do this most of the time in our paid and unpaid work. We work under the name Simon Jolán Egylet. The word ‘Egylet’, means ensemble, evokes the early avant-garde, we work together, not as an organisation, but as a creative group. There is no theatrical or artistic reason for preserving our anonymity, we simply cannot afford to lose our money-earning jobs, as we have always been economically vulnerable, many of us as single mothers. If we are too far out of the queue, there is always further down the line in a country that can hardly be called free and healthy, patriarchal, socially extremely unequal, covertly and openly approving and generating many forms of corruption, violence, victim blaming.

Our work is created in a creative community of at least two people, with varying numbers. All our works are based on our own social experiences in our everyday lives and aim to capture the spirit of the times.

In addition to our creative expression, we also design participatory community games using the tools of art. Through these we seek to create fictional models that can develop social imagination and the ability to envision the future, seeking to continue the Simon Jolán tradition. Jolán had a very strong vision for a better society. This basic position is still relevant today.