picture from the Wilmanet website (about Viitasaari)
not available anymore
Aune Kinnunen (1931-2021) lived and worked on a farm with a rather large, natural garden. located in the community of Viitasaari, Finland. After an active and especially creative life, in 2018 in her late 80s, she was included in a local home for the elderly. Aune Kinnunen passed away on November 16, 2021. Life an works
In the 1960s Aune Kinnunen began decorating the garden with a variety of sculptures, some made of natural materials like the one above (what is it? kind of phantom from the woods or so?) and like the bear below on the slope of the small river.
picture by Minna Haveri
Apart from natural materials she also worked with concrete, decorating the walls and the doors of the barns with white frescoes, and making sculptures, like the little fisherman along the waterside in the picture below.
picture from the Wilmanet website
The interior of the house has been decorated too, with smaller creations and with sculptures which give one the impression as if they belong to the family or just came along to pay a visit and say hello.
Expositions
Aune Kinnunen's work was exposed on an exposition entitled l'Esprit de la Forêt (Spirit of the Forest) in the Paris Halle St Pierre (2006). This exhibition had works of some other non-professional artists from Finland too, as well as from artists from other countries.
She has also participated in expositions on outsider art in Finland and in the Annan Konst (Other Art) touring exposition (2009/2010).
Documentation
* article in memory of Aune Kinnunen by Raija Kallioinen on the MSL website
* article by Elina Vuorimies and Raija Kallioinen on the ITE-taide website
first published March 2010, last revised November 2021 Aune Kinnunen Sculpture garden Viitasaari, Central Finland, Western and Central Finland
The Moscow Museum of Outsider Art¹ refers on its website to Alexei Ivanovich Rudov, who made an art environment, named the Home Museum of wooden sculptures. The website has no details about this environment.
However, in an interview with James Young, which was published in Raw Vision nr 50 (winter 2005), Anna Yarkina, who at that time was deputy director of the Moscow Museum, gives more information.
Life and works
Alexei Rudov (1926-2002) lived in the city of Kondrovo, in the Kaluga area, south of Moscow. He was a railway worker, who had to quit his job around 1976, when he was 50 years old. His doctor advised him to start some creative activity, probably to prevent that Rudov would become depressive because of being idle.
That was a very good advice. Rudov began making sculptures and experienced this as a very rewarding activity. So he continued making all kind of personalities, using wood and parts of old trees. The sculptures were exposed in the garden around his house. In the 1980s this garden got the character of a museum, that was frequently visited by the local people.
The idea behind the exposition was more educative than artistic. Rudov's primary aim was to teach people to live a good life, so he told the children who visited the garden, how to experience and love beauty and how to be good people.
I understand the garden also had some reputation as an ideal backdrop for making wedding images.
This in short is the story.
No other primary sources or documentation
To my best knowledge, the Moscow Museum is the only primary source on the internet that has information about Rudov's life and works.
The website Atlas Obscura meanwhile (2017) has a number of pictures of the site submitted by its readers. The short accompanying text does not include any new information.
Actual situation of the site unclear
After Rudov died, his son has arranged that a number of his sculptures were donated to the museum in Moscow. These sculptures will be restored and then will be part of the museum's collection.
There is no information about the actual status of the garden. If it is not cared for, there is a danger that it will be vandalized.
note ¹ Because of financial problems the museum had to close in the course of 2010. Its website is still available on the internet
Alexei Ivanovich Rudov
Home museum of wooden sculptures Kondrovo, Kaluga region, Russian Federation actual status unknown
Home museum of wooden sculptures Kondrovo, Kaluga region, Russian Federation actual status unknown
this picture and the next four (july 2010) courtesy of Inky van Swelm
MonereCarkos Vlado isthe name of a fantasy empire in the Netherlands, a name that has associations with Slavic languages and could mean power of tsar.
Life and works
It is a realm created by dutch outsider artist Gerard van Lankveld (b. 1947), who lives in Gemert, a community in the Brabant area in the Netherlands.
Van Lankveld hasn't any formal artistic training. His creative talent has developed in a very personal way. Already at the age of sixteen he began making various kinds of mechanical devices, a creative activity he has continued all his life, resulting in the creation of the most wonderful objects.
Young Gerard withdrew into an own world of creativity also in response to the rather hostile treatment he got from other youngsters and adults in the community because he was considered to be "different". By creating his own world he was able to be a personality in his own way.
In 1969, when he was in his early twenties, van Lankveld created the flag that would characterize his own world, the empire Monera Carkos Vlado.
For one part this realm manifests itself in the objects he created, which are on display in and around his house.
decorations on top of a clock that remind of
Russian-orthodox churches
The interior has a large collection of all kinds of mechanical objects, instruments, clocks, ornaments etc, all constructed with a lot of ingenuity and creativity.
front of a clock
At the outside van Lankveld has decorated the exterior walls, the roofs and the garden with various structures and decorative ornaments. He also constructed some colorful towers that raise high in the sky.
His creations often show an affinity with eastern-orthodox architecture and Cyrillic orthography.
the tower has been repainted (July 2010) and will be replaced on the pedestal on the roof
For another part, the empire of Monera, of which van Lankveld is the self-proclaimed emperor, manifests itself through a national flag (with colours expressing various phases of development), currency, post stamps and textual elements inspired by Slavic languages.
Gerard van Lankveld with a staff on top of which are some church like constructions
Some friends of van Lankveld had the honor to be appointed as dignitaries of the empire. So there was a secretary of state of food and drinks, a dignitary who had a website in Dutch with recipes for food and drinks.
Recognition and expositions
Initially van Lankveld made his creations and constructions just for himself and not with the idea to expose them. In later years however interest in his work grew and he was asked to participate in expositions.
So in 2005 a number of his creations could be seen in the group exposition Verborgen werelden (Hidden worlds) in theGuislain museum in Gent (Belgium). A selection of his creations is permanently exposed in this Belgian museum, which focuses both upon outsider art and the history of psychiatry.
In 2007 the museum 't Oude Slotin Veldhoven (Netherlands) had an exposition of Lankveld's smaller objects.
In the summer of 2008 the Deutsches Architekturmusem, Frankfurt, had an exposition entitled Heterotopia, that showed works of van Lankveld, together with creations of Willem van Genk, Stefan Häfner, and others (Heterotopia is an expression introduced by Foucault, referring to parallel social worlds).
catalogue of the exposition in Frankfurt, published by Kehrer Verlag
In 2009 Gerard van Lankveld participated in the exposition Backyard Genius in Kemzeke, Belgium organised by the Guislain Museum and the Dutch Collectie de Stadshof on the premises of the Belgian Verbeke Foundation.
The community of Gemert, where van Lankveld lives, commissioned van Lankveld to design a monument to decorate the western entrance of the community. It became the Klaïda, kind of a tower, which was installed in the autumn of 2007. The picture below shows the official ceremonies, just before the creation was completed with a cross on its top.
In 2019 -on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the empire- a large exhibition with an overview of van Lankveld's artwork was held in his hometown Gemert (March 11-April 28)
A Dutch foundation, Stichting Monera, presided by Ton Thelen aims to promote and protect Lankveld's creations.
Videos
* Video compiled from a Dutch TV program 1997 (YouTube, 8'04", uploaded November 2012 by Arnold Jan Scheer, Dutch spoken, no subtitles)
* Video by Arno Maas (10'41", YouTube, April 2016, uploaded May 2016, in Dutch)
* In the context of the above-mentioned exhibition in 2019 Omroep Centraal made a collage of some videos that have been made about van Lankveld, including the first video above (YouTube, 48'16")
first published March 2010, last revised January 2022
Gerard van Lankveld
Monera Carkos Vlado
Gemert, Netherlands no public visits
These sculptures from tree stumps have been made by André Morvan (1934-2019) who all his life has lived around the Mont Salut location.
Morvan had a job as a carpenter and he probably began making the wooden sculptures once he had become retired in the 1990s.
picture courtesy of Sophie Lepetit
Fascinated by old trees and tree stumps, he would see all kind of personalities and representations in these trunks and by adapting them he succeeded in bringing their soul to life.
The sculptures are exposed all around the café. Some of them are between two and three meters high.
Documentation * pictures onweblogles grigris de Sophie (February 7, 2011)
* above weblog also has an article by Michel Leroux entitled From Hell, I made paradise; a translation into English is available in OEE texts
* article about the site by Sonia Terhzaz on her website Cartographie des Rocamberlus (environments d'art singulier), reporting the visit she paid in June 2018.
Video
* fragmentabout the site on the North France trip video by Serflac (You Tube, starts at 12.13, cannot be embedded here)
note
¹ Zon'art magazine (1999-2008) isn't available anymore on the internet; see also OEE-texts
first published March 2010, last revised April 2023
André Morvan
Jardin de sculptures
Mont-Salut
56400 Ploemel, dept Morbihan, region Brittany, France
can be seen from the road
(and if you order a drink you can sit on the terrace and watch from there) streetview
A small bridge over the Sasso river connected the Via del Pescatori in Bordighera (Italy) with Marcello Cammi's garden, located near the Mediterranean Sea. On the picture the bridge is dotted with sculptures and so was the garden. Cammi's site included hundreds of sculptures.
No use to go there and take a look. The bridge and the garden have gone, the sculptures have disappeared.
Life and works
Born in San Remo, a community on Italy's Ligurian coast not far from the border with France, Marcello Cammi (1912-1994) at a very young age lost his mother.
Father and son moved to the nearby community of Bordighera and as a young man Cammi would assist his father, who had a business in making garden elements from concrete.
In 1935 he married and the couple soon got a son.
Some sources describe Cammi as a revolutionary or an anarchist, but probably he was rather a communist Italian style. Anyhow, during WWII he joined the Russian army in the war against Germany. He lost a finger of his left hand in 1941 and at the end of the war he was interned in Mauthausen. That period may have influenced his later artistic expressions.
Once returned to Bordighera, Cammi resumed his profession as a mason, making concrete garden elements for his customers, such as benches, tables, fish pools or fences.
In the late 1940s, early 1950s Cammi began making sculptures by covering modeled iron frames with concrete. He displayed the sculptures in the garden around his house on a plot of land he rented from the city, an area located along the local Sasso river.
His sculptures included mythological characters, women, holy persons, animals, skeletal bodies reflecting the situation in Mauthausen and many other works, not just sculptures, but also artwork in low reliefs, half busts or masks. A large part of his work was dedicated to the partisans of the Italian resistance during the war.
Active in sculpting during the rest of his life, Cammi may have produced some 3000 sculptures. and besides sculpting, he also made a large number of paintings.
The fate of the garden
Marcello Cammi died November 3, 1994, soon after his son had died from a disease. His wife, Vittorina Cammi, has tried to take care of the sculpture garden, but she had to do this without any support from the community or local authorities.
The small river Sasso that runs along the garden could occasionally flow violently and in 1998 a flooding demolished its banks and some of the sculptures.
Around 2000 a French group of lovers of outsider art has tried to interest local authorities in taking measures to regulate the river to protect the sculpture garden against flooding, but this action was in vain.
In 2005 a gas explosion at the premises caused the death of Vittoria Cammi and the destruction of another number of sculptures. On September 14, 2006 there was another flooding of the river, that destructed more creations or washed them into the sea.
A number of sculptures, legated to the city by Vittoria Cammi before her death, were saved and were stored in various places
The September 2006 flooding was the end of Cammi's art environment. In October 2006, the city, owner of the terrain, cleaned the site with a bulldozer.
The paintings
Many paintings however have been saved and have been presented at expositions.
A project to restore and re-expose the sculptures
What remained of Cammi's creations was stored in Bordighera in different locations. Around 2018, Marco Farotto, chairman of the council of Bordighera, took the initiative for a project to bring all the stored works together in one place, restore them and then find a suitable place where they can be exposed. This project was supported by the Mayor of Bordighera, Vittorio Ingenito.
A number of sculptures have now (2020) been renovated and on May 3, 2021, the Giardino diCammi was inaugurated, an open space near the beach of Arziglia, where seven works by Marcello Cammi are placed.
Here are three photos taken of these sculptures during a trip made by Tiramisu Bootfighter in July 2022 as part of his projectLa Valise, Galerie Ambulante.
Documentation
* Film (1999, 12") by Murie Anssens Marcello Cammi Le jardin secret 1
* Pictures by Roberto Keller Veirana on Flickr
*Pictures (2010-2011) by Marisa Fogliarini on her website
* Pictures by Piero Farina on his website * Article (January 2008) by Bruno Montpied on his weblog, with pictures (1990)
* Article on the website Costruttori di Babele.
* Article (2012) on SPACES website
Videos * On a video (2018, YouTube, 5'50") Marco Farotto shows the stored sculptures and explains his project to restore them and to exhibit them in a suitable place
* Video (6'04", YouTube, April 2012), "Marcello Cammi" by Olga Caldas, Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporaine de Nice, 1999
* Video by Guiliano Sicchiero (YouTube, 6'55", August 2013)
first published March 2010, last revised March 2023
Above photo of Bonaria Manca is a still from the Marie Famulicki movie La sérénité sans carburant (Serenity with no fuel), produced in 2004 when Manca was at age 79 and had become known in the fields of outsider art and art environments
Life and works
Bonaria Manca was born on July 10th, 1925 in the small community of Orune on the isle of Sardinia, In 1947 her family moved to the Viterbo area on Italy's mainland, north of Rome.
In 1965 she settled in the community of Tuscania in a house bought by the family. Her marriage, contracted in 1968, held only some 12 years, especially because her husband could not accept Bonaria's independent way of life.
After her mother in 1975 and a beloved brother in 1978 had died, and her husband had left her in 1980, she fell into a crisis, which she overcame in 1981 by starting to make paintings.
Although Bonaria Manca always had been fond of creative work, such as doing embroidery, painting became her passion, such a passion indeed, that from 1997 on she also began decorating walls and ceilings of her house with frescoes.
Her themes included rural, religious and biblical scenes, memories from her life, totemic figures, all done in her specific personal style and use of colors.
this picture and the next two courtesy of Roberto Loru
Bonaria Manca also has been working on canvas and card board, in her work evocating memories of her youth, scenes of rivers, mountains, woods, nature....
She was rather reluctant to sell her work since she felt that these works had a soul and should stay where they originated and not separated from her.
However, the Dutch outsider art collection De Stadshofcould buy one of her paintings, which was displayed for the first in the group exhibition Masters of the Margin (De Stadshof, Zwolle, Netherlands, November 1999 - March 2000). Later more paintings were added to the Stadshof collection.
In 2004 Marie Famulicki presented her movie Serenity without fuel, featuring the artist and her creations.
In subsequent years Manca's paintings on canvas have been exposed in various venues in Europe (Rome, Sardinia, Gent, Paris....).
Partly because of these expositions, Manca's creative work has become increasingly known, also internationally.
In her late eighties, in 2013, Bonaria Manca ended making paintings. She passed away in the early hours of October 17th, 2020.
A conference and a booklet about the artist
In September 2014 a conference was held in Tuscania on the occasion of the publication of the booklet Bonaria Manca. Rinascere ogni giorno, edited by Pavel Konečný and Roberta Trapani (see documentation).
Saving the site for the future
In the meantime (in October 2013) an association of friends was formed, which aimed to sustain the artist now she was in her nineties and which also aimed to save Manca's house for the future. In September 2015 this Associazione Bonaria Manca organized a conference in Tuscania.
In December 2015 it was announced that the Italian Department of Culture had decided that Bonaria Manca's house and her artworks inside the house would have a protected status indeed. In the future it might be used as a studio for artists in residence
Selected documentation * The official website "Bonario Manca" with biography, pictures of her oeuvre. lists of articles, books and so on * Website of the Dutch outsider art collection de Stadshof * Article by Roberta Trapani on SPACES website * Article (September 2018) by Desirée Maida, "Alla scoperta della Casa dei Simboli, dimora dell’artista pastora Bonaria Manca a Tuscania" (Discovering the House of Symbols, home of the shepherdess/artist Bonaria Manca in Tuscania), on website Artribune
* Article (October 17th, 2020) in newspaper Corriere della Sera with an in memoriam of Bonaria Manca.
Movie
* Marie Famulicki, Serenity with no fuel (La sérénité sans carburant), movie produced by Stella Productions (2004, 52') ; a small fragment (1'15"):
Videos
* Video by Lazio Innova (YouTube, 2'29". uploaded march 2015
* A video by La Donna Sarda, added October 2016 to Vimeo
first published July 2010, last revised April 2025
Bonaria Manca Strada Viterbese n. 1, 01017 Tuscania,Viterbo, Lazio, Italy visits only on appointment via info@Bonariamanca.it
