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What does it mean to make work from the space of breakdown? Not as metaphor, but as material condition—as the body that refuses productivity, the mind that perceives time differently, the nervous system attuned to frequencies capitalism deems dysfunction. Hungarian artist Szilvia Bolla's practice emerges from this refusal, transforming depression, transgenerational trauma, and neurodivergent temporality into sculptural languages that speak back to the medical-industrial complex.Working across photography, sculpture, and installation, Bolla constructs what she calls "biomedical entities"—fragmented, porous forms that evoke bodies without fully representing them. These are not illustrations of illness but articulations of resistance: the Gothic monsters of late capitalism, factory girls whose distorted forms revolt against the systems that created them. Her materials carry their own narratives—light-sensitive resin that functions like photographic paper, metals like silver and copper that register time and decay, Art Nouveau ornaments representing entangled organs. Each choice is deliberate, each fragment a refusal of the "dead abstraction" of biopower.There's a particular urgency to Bolla's invocation of the Gothic. Drawing from 18th and 19th century fiction that pictured industrial factories as vampiric forces devouring living labor, she updates this tradition for our moment of neoliberal extraction. If the original Gothic revealed how industrialisation created "monstrous" disabled bodies—particularly female bodies deemed unproductive—Bolla's contemporary Gothic posthumanism asks: what monsters does late capitalism produce? What forms of embodiment are pathologised simply for existing outside normative frameworks of time, productivity, and affect?Her recent installation, Preliminary Materials for a Neurogenesis of A Young-Gir,l responds to Tiqqun's theorization of how female identity becomes currency under neoliberalism, but extends it through the lens of what she calls "crip time"—Ellen Samuels' formulation of time as grief time, broken time, vampire time. Works like Daughter of Depressed Daughters and I Was at Home The Entire Time and All I Did Was Feel Everything materialize the absence of performing social roles, the suspension in thought-spirals, the legitimacy of bedrotting as a radical act.This interview, published as HERVISIONS Members Portal launches on the winter solstice 2025, extends our ongoing investigations into rewilding technology and neurodivergent practices. Bolla's work asks who gets to speak about depression, what forms of knowledge are legitimised, and how art creates shared languages of refusal. In embracing what Ann Cvetkovich calls "depression as public feeling," she offers not solutions but solidarity—work that says to those experiencing similar realities: I hear you, I'm with you, you're not alone.

Hervisions: Your work consistently moves between photography, sculpture, and installation and much of your practice engages depression, transgenerational trauma, and memory. How do these experiences first enter your work: through research, material experimentation, or lived experience?Szilvia Bolla: There are autobiographical layers that I anchor with critical theory, shifting between the individual and the transgenerational, the personal and the political, from the communist past to the current far-right illiberal doom in Hungary. I address what it means and how it feels to be what we call mentally ill within the framework of the medical-industrial complex of late capitalism. Is it the failure of the individual, incapable of productivity and capital accumulation? False chemical imbalance, diagnosis, or biological determination? Inheritance? A gift of emotional, cognitive, and nervous hypersensitivity or rather, irrational empathy? Could it be psychosomatic resistance to the unbearable reality of a collapsing world and historical injustices? A delusion, way too dark or rather hopeful imagination that it doesn’t have to be this way? Dreaming of another future? Empowerment found in collective vulnerability? Making all this seen through sculpture, photography, and installation is an attempt to saturate the biomedical discourse that often just numbs us.

Image: Szilvia Bolla, Preliminary Materials for a Neurogenesis of the Young-Girl, 2025. Photo: Lower Cavity.Hervisions: There’s a strong Gothic sensibility in your work, decay, vulnerability, transformation, but reframed through contemporary technologies and systems. What does Gothic post-humanism allow you to express that other aesthetics do not?Szilvia Bolla: My sculptures represent biomedical entities and allow them the right to be opaque and ambiguous. In a sense, they are monstrous, but there’s more to their distorted forms as there is more to the gothic tradition than mournful stories. Some examples of gothic fiction of the late 18th and early 19th century pictured the early industrial socioeconomic landscape as a vampiric factory devouring living labour like blood as its fuel. These stories intertwined the rhetoric of disability and industrialisation to reveal to us the monster that was that new, mechanised, production-driven world (Marshall, Industrial Gothic, 2022) and the monsters, i.e. the distorted minds and disabled (most often, female) bodies that this world has created. Yet, the gothic framing allows these monstrous protagonists, these factory girls, to revolt and reject the system. In <a href="https://www.ofluxo.net/preliminary-materials-for-a-neurogenesis-of-the-young-girl-szilvia-bolla-lower-cavity-holyoke/?fbclid=IwY2xjawO2KNtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFGRjVxV3RFVmpVcHNJNFpGc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHkeCUg7MlIcRLdefOhxvbYZVKD2LJEk7c5QxdJr6uqOOytMgv3ZRuS0jUlaa_aem_iG81loYgiYhNK6H37feXVg">Preliminary Materials for a Neurogenesis of A Young-Girl</a> presented earlier this year at <a href="https://www.lowercavity.space/szilvia-bolla">Lower Cavity</a> (Holyoke, US), there is another monster at the centre of my attention. I responded to the architecture of a former paper mill - a gothic scenery in itself -&nbsp; with a deconstructed conveyor belt forming the fragmented spinal cord of a production line of found lab instruments, 3D printed sculptures, childhood memories, and girly trinkets. The title comes from Tiqqun’s publication Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl, in which they write how the female body and identity become currency under neoliberalism. Similarly, I was interested in how girlhood itself is pathologised under capitalism. I wanted to give space to this factory girl archetype of Gothic fiction.Hervisions: Your sculptural works often evoke bodies without fully representing them - fragmented, porous, or hybrid forms. How do material choices help you think about bodies shaped by biopolitics rather than individual identity?Szilvia Bolla: I choose materials for their narrative dimensions. Lately, I have been working with stereolithography as an expansion of my photographic practice. Light-sensitive resin, similar to photographic paper, is a substrate onto which images are exposed, and the 3D printer functions as the enlarger, projecting images vertically. Other materials, metals such as silver, calcium, and copper, also appear in my work for their capacities to carry narratives about the human body, time, decay, and transformation.&nbsp;The shapes often come from fragmented Art Nouveau ornaments representing entangled repetitions of organs. I find them fascinating because they revisit the turn-of-the-century conflict between functionalism and decorative arts, between dead abstraction and vital figuration, the inorganic and the organic, body and technology. For me, these ornaments convey the antidote for a world of abstract biopower.Hervisions: How do you balance research-driven concepts like pharmacology or political economy with intuition and affect in the studio?Szilvia Bolla: I first encountered pharmacology and psychiatry, as well as the economy that dictates them on a personal level. The systemic nontransparency and inaccessibility to general knowledge of healthcare moved me to do my own research and find support in material feminist memoirs and autofictions. Such discourses and testimonies create a shared language as a form of refusal and resistance. Having the chance to approach it in the form of a studio-based art practice is a mere privilege. When I think of affect, I would like to invite viewers to embrace mutable interpretations and empathy towards a different perception of temporality and space. I also often think of creating work that speaks to a depressed teenager, telling them “I hear you, I’m with you, you’re not alone”.Hervisions: Across your recent installations, there’s a sense of time that feels non-linear, stalled, looping, or suspended. This is also true for your collaborative work as Alagya. How do you think about temporality when working with trauma and mental health?Szilvia Bolla: A non-normative perception of time is inherent to such experiences, but it’s almost invisible. There is a beautiful essay by Ellen Samuels, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, where she writes, “crip time is grief time, is broken time, is vampire time”, which I gave as the title of <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/17v8XPKHtRBo_opnE-WKUmfZH8s5jDsXY/view?usp=share_link">a recent sculptural work</a>, an enlarged grungy pink weekly pill-organiser. Another recurring element of my work is the bed and understanding time spent in bed as a person going through depression, semi-ironically bedrotting per se. In the sculptures <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pr3ZFUjizpS9JfX1sfTWL9PDjfExOSLy/view?usp=share_link">Daughter of Depressed Daughters</a> and <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hoiKkC706aSg7ai-KrxNBpHbfnKwi4Um/view?usp=share_link">I Was at Home The Entire Time and All I Did Was Feel Everything</a>, I think about showing the absence of performing social roles, also traces of slowness, suspense in thought -spirals or outside of whatever the normalised, “healthy” frameworks are.

Image: Szilvia Bolla, Preliminary Materials for a Neurogenesis of the Young-Girl, 2025. Photo: Lower Cavity.Hervisions: At this moment, what questions feel most urgent for you, politically, materially, or emotionally, as you continue developing your practice?Szilvia Bolla: In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich addresses the legitimacy and authenticity of artistic practices that deal with depression, as well as the urgency of undoing hierarchies of cultural authority. I find this framing liberating, especially in how it reframes who is allowed to speak about depression. This part grounds that position clearly:“At stake here are not just different understandings of depression but questions of cultural authority. Who are depression’s public intellectuals? Is it the doctors and scientists? Ordinary people, who are experiencing depression? The historians and humanists who can tell us about the cultural and social record? Artists whose attention to form and genre might create new ways of representing depression?”

<h2>About the artist</h2>Szilvia Bolla (b. Budapest, Hungary) lives and works between Budapest, Hungary and The Hague, The Netherlands. She explores the personal, social, and cultural dimensions of depression, transgenerational trauma and memory through sculpture and photography, evoking bodies shaped by biopolitics. After graduating from the Fine Art Photography course at Camberwell College of Arts in London, she completed the MA Photography course at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. She is currently part of the MFA program at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.&nbsp;In recent years, her work has been presented at Gossamer Fog, London; Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław; Trafó Gallery, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest and Victoria &amp; Albert Museum, London. She has been an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; the International Studio &amp; Curatorial Program, New York City; Brno House of Arts, Brno; and the recipient of the Eastern European Network Fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. She’s part of the artist duo Alagya with Áron Lődi. They construct new possible forms of literacy to decode planetary life in the capitalocene through writing, storytelling, and installation.

Image credits in order of appearance: Lower Cavity, Limbo Contemporary, Lower Cavity, Trafó Gallery, Lower Cavity, Lower Cavity.

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