A little train is perched on a hill above Budapest. Young Hungarians have been looking after it for decades. The best pupils in Hungarian schools earn the right to go to this summer camp where, for the duration of their stay, they can wear a stationmaster’s or a ticket collector’s uniform borrowed from the Communist pioneer movement. On the rails and on board the train, which incidentally they are not allowed to drive, they are propelled towards adulthood. These young boys and girls inhabit an improbable space-time location. They are expected to behave as if they were of an age that they have not yet attained, and they are aware of their bodies moving around in a uniform and in an environment that evoke the Communist era, a period that they never knew. The receding verticals of the rails, the straight lines of the station canopies and wooden benches, the whole thing punctuated by socialist realism sculptures: an anachronistic rectitude fills the image; no trace here of the outside world.
