About the project
HOW ARE YOU, REALLY? – Mapping Urban Atmospheres is a participatory outdoor installation by Deák Róza, taking place in Budapest in October 2026. A modular, steel-framed structure draped in translucent fabric panels displays hundreds of anonymous texts from falrairva.hu — an archive of anonymous urban messages: spontaneous words and phrases scratched, painted, stencilled or pasted onto city walls, soon to be painted over and forgotten. The sheer volume of text is the message: a collective, unfiltered portrait of what occupies people’s minds in urban space. Passersby are invited to add their own words directly onto the fabric. Treating street writing as honest, qualitative data about the social and emotional climate of a city, the project sits at the intersection of community archiving, participatory art, and urban observation — making visible what is usually erased.
About the project’s approach
Open. Anyone can add to the falrairva.hu archive, and anyone can write on the installation. There are no rules about what belongs — people write whatever matters to them in that moment.
Collaborative. The project is made of other people’s words: their thoughts, confessions, anger, love, and jokes, written on walls for everyone to see. The archive already holds hundreds of these anonymous messages, and the installation collects new ones on the spot. No one signs their name.
Regenerative. Writing on walls doesn’t last — it gets painted over, washed away, or torn down. This project saves it, and gives space to words that were never meant to survive. What normally disappears becomes something worth keeping.
Ecosystemic. Each small, anonymous message joins a bigger picture of how people really feel in a city — something honest that surveys and statistics usually miss.