pictures (2024) are screen-prints from Google Streetview
Bragança is a municipality with about 34,750 inhabitants (2001) in the north of Portugal, near the border with Spain.
The city is bisected by the Fervença river and near a bridge in the city, along a bank of the river, there is an outdoor area belonging to a house, that in recent years has been transformed into an art environment.
Life and works
This art environment was created by José Santana, who was born in 1940.
In the 1960s when he was in his early 20s, Santana migrated to France where he would work for about 37 years, eventually as a team leader, in a company that built bridges, including very large ones such as a five-kilometer long railway bridge.
In France he met his wife, started a family with children and one of his first experiences with creativity was making nativity scenes for and with his daughters.
Once retired, he returned to Portugal, settled in Bragança and in 2005, at the age of 65, he was inspired to do something creative.
Influenced by his time in France, that "something" became a replica of the Eiffel Tower, The replica was installed in the outdoor area of his house, near the bridge over the Fervença river.
That was the beginning of the creation of an art environment, which in February 2014, when he was interviewed by the regional newspaper Nordeste, had already reached a considerable size.
Santana is a quiet, meticulous worker, who has a photographic memory, which comes in handy when making replicas of large buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Praça da Sé in São Paulo, the Santo Condestável in Lisbon, the Taj Mahal in India, the Sanctuary of Fátima and the Outeiro Sanctuary in Bragança,
But the site also includes small-scale creations of, for example, biblical characters such as Joseph and Mary, or a scene of three friends around a table, where the beard of one of them is provided with real hair from Santana's own hairdo.
this image and the next two (2023) as on journal 20minut
The decorated house pictured above is located in the Kutkivtsi suburb of Ternopil, a city of 225,000 inhabitants (2021) in western Ukraine.
These decorations are applied to two of the four exterior walls of the house, one along the street, the other on the left side wall seen from the street.
The name of the occupant of the house, most likely the one who added the decorations, is unknown.
As far as could be determined, there are two Ukrainian sources on the Internet that pay attention to this art environment,
Julia Inozemtseva, the journalist who wrote about the house, did not find the resident at home and neighbors were also unavailable. She had to limit herself to describing what could be seen on the outside of the house, with the picture of keyhole in the white circle as a particularly striking item.
The other source that does not name the creator is the website of Volt Agapeyev, an artist born in Ternopil, currently working in Kiev. He refers to the mural as an Inner Gingerbread House, where the mural offers extra protection from what is happening inside in the private sphere
Some factual information is available via Google Streetview.
The image below shows the house as it looked in May 2015. It seems to have been made when the construction of the house had just been completed.
So the application of the colorful decoration on the front and left side wall, including the remarkable keyhole, must have started after this date.
Documentation
* Article (March 2023) in Ternopil newspaper 20minut
* Article (undated) on the website of Volt Agapeyev
Anonymous
Decorated house
Hlyboka Dolyna Street, 3
District Kutkivtsi, City of Ternopil, region Ternopil, Ukraine
all images in this post are from Google Streetview this one by by Timur Matsiev
The man with a suitcase, waiting patiently for the bus by the side of the road, as in the image above, is one of the remaining sculptures of an art environment with sculptures in Finland
People living in the area call this man Vasarainen Vaari, which is Finnish for Grandfather Vassarainen.
This name also refers to the location of the bus stop, which is along a major road not far from the hamlet of Vasarainen, that is part of the municipality of Rauma in the Satakunta region in South-West Finland.
part of a photo by filemo films
Above magnification shows the friendly smile given to the man with the suitcase by Tuula Paavola, the non-professional artist who created the sculpture.
She was born in 1971 and works in Vasarainen as a nurse.
In her younger years she was already active in making creations and she followed a course in making garden sculptures at Rauma Civic College.
When she started creating an art environment along the main road is not exactly known.
On Google Streetview from 2011 there is no art environment to see yet. On the shots on Streetview made eight years later, in 2019, the man waiting for the bus can be seen, as well as a small wooden structure with an open front and inside an animal resembling a horse.
this image (July 2020) by Timo Kostamo
In 2020, the site was expanded with a number of animals, such as a lying horse, a standing horse and a large, difficult to recognize animal that looks a bit like an elephant.
August 2019
A short-lived art environment with limited publicity
In the field of Finnish ITE-art Tuula Paavola has not yet got much publicity, On the internet there is a short article in ITE-Satakunnassa. p.64
Another concise text about her sculptures, appeared on the Finnish website Walttia.
This text looks back on the summer crowds that in 2020 would like to visit the art environment, when it was in full existence. There was only room for a few cars to park along the road and some residents of Vassarainen made it quite clear that the safety of passing motorists had been jeopardized.
It is not incomprehensible that Tuula Paavola took this very much to heart and removed most of the sculptures, leaving lonely the sculpture of the man waiting for the bus.
Tuula Paavola
Waiting for the bus near a short-lived art environment
The decorated house, as pictured above, is located on a street in Lorca, a municipality with over 91,000 inhabitants (2016) in the south-east of Spain.
Life and works
This decoration was created by Acacia Mateo Pérez-Castejón (25 September 1905 - 1 May 2003), simply referred to as Acacia Mateo. He was born in Motril, a municipality about 250 km south-east of Lorca.
Why his parents moved from Motril to Lorca is unknown, just as not everything is known about Mateo's professional life.
Mateo did his military service in Barcelona.
Here he came into contact with the art that Gaudi created. He was particularly struck when he saw that all kinds of buildings were decorated with ceramics. This must have given him the idea to do the same with the house in Lorca that he moved into after his time in Barcelona.
The house is situated in a street with adjoining buildings, both apartment flats and simple family homes. Mateo's house belongs to the latter category, with a downstairs space, an upstairs space and a roof terrace.
The images above show that the right balcony seen from the street is missing the railing, which was caused by a passing truck hitting it.
Mateo began decorating the façade in the early 1930s and worked on it for about twenty years.
The style he worked in is trencadís, an approach that was also widely used by Gaudi and is characterized by the use of small pieces of ceramic from stone objects or marble tiles, which are used to create various forms of mosaic.
The interior is also richly decorated. Tables, beds and bedside tables are equipped with trencadis, there is a covered fountain and also a kind of cave.
There are no images of it, because after Mateo's death in 2003 the house was no longer inhabited and not accessible anymore
On May 11, 2011, the city of Lorca was hit by two earthquakes. The decorated front of the house remained unscathed, but it is possible that because of the earthquake two small buildings on the roof collapsed, which is not visible from the street.
In 2021 the decorated house was classified as a protected monument by the municipality.
A self-decorated grave monument
this image and the next one (2015) courtesy of Jo Farb Fernandez
In the local cemetery Parroquial San Cristóbal, in 1963 Mateo created a funerary monument to commemorate the death of his father that year. It was later completed with decorations after the deaths of his mother and brother, and Mateo himself will also be buried there.
The monument is decorated in the same style with colorful trencadís and is surrounded by sculpted benches, wavy fences and flower pots.
Documentation
* Article (2014) by Jo Farb Hernandez on the website SPACES
* Article (2018) by Guillermo Cegarra Beltrí on his weblog Modernismo y Art Deco
The municipality of La Maddalena in Italy includes an entire island with an area of approximately 50 km² and about 11,000 inhabitants (November 2013). The island is located north of the main island of Sardinia.
In the southeast of La Maddalena, near the community of Moneta, located along a public road, there is an art environment called Parco Lallo.
With regard to his site, there are currently (November 2024) developments taking place which will be described below.
The image above gives a certain impression of the location of the site in a bend of the road, but on Google Streetview this can be seen much better
The house of Carmela Ricco, born in 1952 and retired restaurant manager, who together with her daughter Barbara Mula created Parco Lallo, is located near the bend in the road.
It all began when Carmela's son Roberto, who lived only a short time, from 1975 to 1995, as a young man began tending the area along the road near the house by weeding and establishing all kinds of plants and trees.
After Roberto had passed away, the areas along the road were maintained by Carmela and Barbara. this mainly to prevent that these areas would become an open-air dump.
And then, around 2010 the actual development of the art environment began.
As can be seen on the images in this post, nestled between flowers, trees and bushes a world of all kinds of small items such as toys, dolls and vases emerged.
The site also got some larger items, such as Santa Claus and all kinds of fairy tale characters.
Visitors of this characteristic art environment, felt as if ended up in a fairytale world and certainly for children a visit was a special experience, which made them very happy.
However, the local authorities were not very happy with the creation, because it had not come about on private property, but in public space and this probably without official approval.
And so it happened that in the fall of 2024, the municipality announced that the art environment had to disappear.
This was something Carmela and Barbara had not counted on, but after the initial shock had been overcome, an action was set up, also thanks to the support of Gabriele Minna, initiator of the documentation of art environments in Italy.
This action included that residents of Maddalena in particular, but also other interested parties, were invited to take a number of items that are part of the site under their care. In this way, the creations would be preserved and could be reinstalled in the event of a continuation of the art environment at the current location or elsewhere.
To better publicize the action, an account called Parco Lallo, Territorial action babelica, was opened on Facebook on November 4, 2024, edited by Carmela and Gabriele, which quickly gathered more than 700 interested parties.
The process of taking creations under the care of friends of the site has now started and is attracting many interested participants.
It is an approach that, to my knowledge, has not been used before in the field of art environments.
The intention is to create a new art environment, filled with the creations that have been given into storage. If that fails, then because of the wide distribution of the creations of the current site, the memory will remain alive in a very wide circle.
Documentation
* Public group about Parco Lallo on Facebook, with an introductory article by Gabriele Mina
* Article (2024) about Parco Lallo in Italian website Costruttori di Babele
Video
* Video (Facebook, 2.31) by Marta D'Amico with images of a walk on November 7, 2024 ending at Parca Lallo, with shots of creations still present
Carmela Ricco and Barbara Mula
Parco Lallo
Via Amerigo Vespucci, 32
07024 Isola de La Maddalena, dept Olbia-Tempio, region Sardinia, Italy can be seen from the road
images are screenprints from the video in the documentation
Dzhurynska Slobidka is a small village with about 300 inhabitants in western Ukraine.
Recently, at the end of October 2024, a short film appeared on the Facebook page of the regional TV channel Ternopil 1 in which an inhabitant told how she had provided the outside of her house and the neighbors' house with decorations.
Nadiya Kutsa, the inhabitant, was 64 years old when she was visited and interviewed by the film crew.
She told the reporter that she started decorating her house three years earlier, in 2021. She had not done any decorative or artistic activity during her life and so there is no doubt hat she is a non-professional.
The decorated walls evoke a special atmosphere, especially because to a large extent the stones. partly painted in all kinds of colours. are depicted as if they were in reality the constructional elements of the walls.
These decorative stones, which completely cover the walls of the house, form a defining. basic element of this art environment.
But there are also freestanding decorative elements to be seen, such as the owl and the frog depicted above and the small cylindrical structure in the second image from the top.
The large quantity of partly colourful stones that decorate the walls are often interspersed with trees and shrubs that are provided with a green canopy.
This art environment as a whole makes a calm, controlled impression, as if an experienced artist has effortlessly made a creation.
The neighbours house
This is equally true of the decorations that Nadya Kutsa has applied to the walls of her neighbours' house, a project she started after finishing the beautification of her own home.
Here too we see painted stones alternating with trees with green foliage, all done in a more modest style.
Apart from the video with accompanying explanation on Facebook, and the similar publication in the magazine of the TV channel, there is no other source available about these two Ukrainian art environments.
Documentation
* Video by Ukrainian TV Ternopil 1, on Facebook, October 23, 2024
thanks to Caroline Dahyot, who pointed me to the video about these creations
Nadiya Kutsa
Decorated houses
No address available
Village of Dzhurynska Slobidka, Chortkiv district, Ternopil region, Ukraine
all images published here in agreement with Justyna Orlovska, from her website Off the beaten track
Zgon is a small village with about 150 inhabitants, part of the municipality of Piecki, located in the north-east of Poland in the Warmian-Masurian region. The village is located south of a large lake called Mokre and has a pictorial appearance, especially because of the atmosphere evoked by the many old-style houses.
The village is intersected by the national road DK58 and where this road runs right along the lake, there is a special house, equipped as it is with a sculpture garden.
Take a look at Google Streetview, which has the scene at the location.
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The sculpture garden is a creation of Adam Szubski (1931-2008), who was born in Warsaw.
His father, Stefan Szubski, had a job in metalworking and won many prizes in the years before the Second World War.
Adam Szubski became a stonemason, but he also worked with metal, especially with sheet zinc, .a material he also used at that time to create works of art.
Indeed, although he had no artistic training, he showed in the 1960s that he was motivated and had a talent to create works of art.
He was admitted as a member of the Association of Polish Artists and exhibited his work not only in Warsaw in a café on the Old Town Square, but later also in museums in for example Germany, Italy and Austria.
Szubski had married Anna Sierpińska and in 1972 the couple moved to Zgon to live in a cottage located along the national road DK58 where it runs right next to the lake. Buying the house also meant that the couple saved it from demolition because of its poor condition.
One of the first projects they undertook was to renovate the hundred-year-old house, which they did by restoring the original interior as much as possible and refurbishing and reusing what was left of the equipment from earlier years, such as old stoves and fireplaces. By doing this the house was eventually recognized as a monument
The couple was also active in projects that benefited the community in Zgon. For example, they founded an association that focused on creative activities with the inhabitants and Szubski arranged for the restoration of the local old windmill, which not only resulted in a tourist attraction. but also contributed to pumping water from the surrounding meadows.
The FACES project
In the 1990s, when Szubski was in his sixties, he became inspired by the idea to decorate the garden near the house and so he began making sculptures using a mixture of cement, resins, acrylic and paint.
It became a project, called Faces, which resulted in some 200 creations, mainly of human heads.
These heads got different shapes, sizes and expressions, sometimes realistic, sometimes fantastic, but occasionally also grotesque, strange or creepy for some people visiting the site.
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The sculptures depicted heads of famous people, friends, acquaintances and residents, but also .characters from mythology, fairy tales and literature.
Among the celebrities were depictions of people such as Pope John Paul II (a cardinal from Poland, elected pope in 1978), Lech Wałęsa (president of Poland from 1990-1995) and Marilyn Monroe (American actress, 1926-1962).
By the way, as can be seen in the images, besides the collection of heads there are also sculptures that depict people in full length.
Adam Szubski died on November 15, 2008.
His family takes care of the maintenance of the sculptures and occasionally organizes exhibitions and workshops in sculpture
The gallery is open to visitors from May to October.
Documentation
* Article (2024) by Justyna Orlovska on her website Off the beaten track
* Article (2022) by Radosław Łabarzewscy on his website Znalezienie
* Article(undated) on website Mazury24, with a large number of photos
Videos
* Video (2004, YouTube, 0.47) by Center for Education and Cultural Initiatives in Olsztyn.
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