Mountains, national imaginations, identities, the power of cartography, and geographical coupling: the mysterious links between four - Dutch and Hungarian - peaks were the topics of the second event of Work Area, with filmmaker and social anthropologist Tommie Leisink and fine artist Szabolcs KissPál as our guests. "On October 10, 2010 the Dutch Antilles were dissolved. Three of its islands, Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius, became part of the Netherlands. When that happened the highest point of theNetherlands moved. Vaalserberg in Limburg lost its status as the highest point of the country, and Mount Scenery on Saba took its place. Two places almost 10.000 kilometers apart became irreversibly linked. The inhabitants of Vaals and Saba share a nationality and a government. But what does this mean? Mountains and Molehills (2012) brings these two distinct places together. As we follow the inhabitants of the two mountains, they share with us their views on the historic, symbolic, and political meanings of moving mountains." Considering that the creators (who successfully lobbied for a new map of the Netherlands that includes these islands) first launched their project about these moving mountains under the name Centre for Transnational Summit Revision and Geographical Coupling, it is difficult not to think of those mountains too that "moved away" from Hungary after WWI due to border changes, and of the revisionist fantasies still very much alive today, embodied in the book and the motto "Give Me Back My Mountains!" Not unrelatedly, geographical coupling also resonated well here: linking distant peaks together, while operating between reality and fiction, ethnography and architecture, Szabolcs KissPál's short, Amorous Geography (2012) recalled the history of the Great Rock in the Budapest Zoo, modeled after a Transylvanian mountain.

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