Anima Mundi takes its title from the Platonic idea of a world spirit, a principle connecting all beings. Máté Bartha’s interest lies less in whether such a force exists than in the human need to believe in it. Working as a fictional observer, he wanders the modern metropolis like a detective, hunting for patterns and hidden connections. What he captures is not a particular city but an archetypal one, assembled from photographs made in various global locations and combined into an unidentifiable, virtual cityscape. Real and staged scenes sit together, and the result is a metropolis that reads as a social product turned autonomous organism.

The photographs recur as motifs: grid structures, posters, and other urban elements that promise orientation yet withhold it. Arranged in a modular grid, they become metaphors for the attempt to find structure in an arbitrary world. The book is conceived as an obscure encyclopedia, taking cues from the Voynich Manuscript, Robert Fludd’s mystical diagrams, and Luigi Seraphini’s Codex Seraphinianus. Its chapters move from the microcosmic to the cosmic, asking the reader to act as an interpreter rather than a passive viewer. Bartha’s approach challenges anthropocentric habits and proposes a post-human grammar for reading the city.

Eriskay Connection publishes Anima Mundi in a hardcover with a loose inlay, 136 pages at 163 × 312 mm. Emese Musci and Paul Dijstelberge contribute texts; Carel Fransen designed the book. For collectors drawn to photographic sequences that function as arguments about how we organize knowledge, this volume repays slow attention: its unusual proportions and modular construction make the act of turning pages part of the inquiry.