Total Recall

The dissident architect László Rajk activated the vast possibilities of the present by invoking collective memory.

Clare Fentress

*Apple computer graphic*, Paris (1988) by László Rajk Courtesy Judit Rajk

Dec 3, 2023

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Staging Future Worlds: The Architectural Visions of László Rajk, curated by Andi Soos and Isi Litke, was on view at the Valerie Goodman Gallery in October.

For three years in the early 1980s, the Hungarian architect László Rajk ran a robust samizdat operation out of his home office in Budapest. With collaborator Gábor Demszky, Rajk issued literature, political commentary, and prison memoirs under the aegis AB Independent Press and sold them, along with other banned publications, out of the same space, named the Rajk Boutique. The project was cutting-edge in its use of a new printing technique, ramka, that Rajk learned from Polish samizdaters he’d met under the auspices of “research trips,” which combined mimeograph and silkscreen. Dozens of titles were published before a raid curtailed its activities in 1983. The raid was far from unexpected, aside from how long it took the authorities to get around to it. “There was an open house on Tuesday evenings, announced on Radio Free Europe,” Rajk told a reporter in 2014. “Everybody knew.”

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