Concept: Anna FODOR, Zorka SCHLÁGA
Team Leaders: Balázs ALMÁSI, Barnabás TÓTH
Creators: 1st-year master’s students in landscape architecture and garden design at the Department of Garden and Open Space Design, MATE TTDI, 2026
Event: Student project as part of the course “Landscape Graphics and Visual Communication 1.”
Location: Lower Garden of the Buda Arboretum, Budapest
Date: April 30, 2025
Major Sponsor: IMRE ORMOS FOUNDATION
Photos: Balázs ALMÁSI
Fireflies in the City
Fireflies are the tiny, almost forgotten protagonists of summer evenings: their fragile presence is linked to a natural experience that is now scarcely accessible in an urban environment. Their light is not merely a spectacle, but a subtle signaling system: a delicate form of communication that unfolds in the dark, one that is at once biological, poetic, and symbolic in nature.
The installation takes this vanishing experience as its starting point. It does not seek to directly evoke fireflies, but rather draws attention to the void left by their absence. The idea of “daytime swarming” transposes the atmosphere of nocturnal radiance into daytime lighting conditions: into a time and space where light no longer emerges from darkness, but becomes perceptible in the reflections, flashes, and barely perceptible vibrations of the existing environment.
The work thus evokes both the hidden workings of nature and the issue of human intervention. The glowing elements appear as part of the landscape, yet they disrupt our habitual perception: they prompt us to pay renewed attention to what usually becomes invisible in everyday urban life. The installation does not reconstruct nature, but rather offers a glimpse of the possibility of a lost sensibility.
