János Csere, Bugaszeg birtok / Bugaszeg estate

all pictures courtesy of Sergio Flaquer Carrera
screenprints from a video he made

In the east of Hungary, south of Lake Balaton, the municipality of Balatonboglár has become known for a special farm, called Bugaszeg. From a political point of view it is special that Bugaszeg has declared itself an independent Republic, seen from the field of art environments it is special that the area of the Republic is full of singular architecture.

Life and works

János Csere, the president of the republic and the creator of the extensive singular architecture, was born  in the late 1940s into a farming family in Balatonboglár

He developed into a special personality. teaching himself to play the piano and violin, even though he couldn't read music and acquiring a large collection of books and paintings.  

But also in his work as a winegrower and winemaker he did an excellent job. He was good with people, and because he knew a lot about plants, for the inhabitants of Balatonboglár. he became the consultant of choice with regard to garden maintenance. 

There was an indication of his later activities as a builder of singular architecture. When he started building a chicken coop, the result was a structure that had more of the allure of an inn.

Building Bugaszeg Estate

Téglagaléria

As the turn of the century approached, Csere was able to purchase a three-acre piece of land, located in a quiet area outside of Balatonboglár. In this way he and his wife hoped to leave the complications of the worldly environment behind.

In the year 2000, when Csere was in his early 50s, he started to build the residential house on the acquired grounds.  He didn't mean to build anything special, but when for construction reasons he had to add a support, he got the idea to make something more special of the project. 

It became a country house with the allure of a castle, three stories high, a cellar and an interior with corridors and large halls, a property referred to as Téglagaléria (Brick Gallery).

Indeed, the building functions as kind of a museum, because nowadays visitors have free access to (part of) the corridors and rooms.

The above image shows how the rather imposing hallways of the house were decorated with paintings collected by Csere in previous years. 

The image below shows a part of Csere's collection of books, not housed in bookcases, but just lying loosely on desks, tables and the floor. The books range from Sartre, Nietzsche and Freud to publications on football and other popular sports.

There is also a spacious dining room, with a large table, which can accommodate a large group of guests. It may happen that a group of visitors is welcomed here and has a meeting with Csere on the spot, who tells about his activities.

After the construction of the house, 

more singular structures followed

Once Téglagaléria was built, Csere couldn't stop adding new structures to the site.

After ten years of work, in general using old stones and other material from demolished buildings, he didn't have to pay for, Csere had built up an estate with a variety of special forms of architecture, that broadly determined the character of the site as an art environment in the capacity of a singular architecture.

In the years that followed, to this day, Csere would continue to work on further detailing and development of the the built assortment that embellished the site.

kind of a face 
decorating a wall

Among the buildings Csere created, there are many towers, including a ten meter high bell tower. These towers are often interlinked in an inventive way. 

The images in this post show that the various towery structures do not have a common shape, but often have their own decorative structure, with almost no tower being the same as another.

towery structures

There are also some isolated high rising structures. 

The image below shows the Trauma Gate, which  commemorates the losses suffered by Hungary. The tower stands on the edge of the site and the passage is closed with an iron gate.

the Trauma Gate

Near this gate is a monument, as depicted in the image below. The creation pays tribute to Csere's father, about whom the caption says in capital letters: szerette a kosszarvu paprikát  (he loved chili peppers)

The site also includes two specific areas, sheltered by trees and separated by a single row of acacia sticks, one is called the Holt költők társasága (Dead Poets Society) and commemorates the great names of world literature and Hungarian literature, the other area, called Magyarok útja (The way of the Hungarians) is dedicated to important figures of Hungarian history.

There are also facilities on the site where animals such as horses, sheep, rabbits and chickens are housed.  A stable houses mangalica piglets, a variety of pigs bred in Hungary, characterized by a thick, curly coat.

Vegetables and plants are grown in the Gecsemáné Garden, where one finds, as a sign says "almost all known Hungarian fruits and vegetables, from olive trees and green peas to poppies."

János Csere, the creator of this art environment, is a warm, hospitable but somewhat headstrong personality, who did not hesitate to declare the area that he himself transformed into a work of art as a Republic. 

A letter of Csere written in 2015, requesting the European Union to recognize his territory as a state, went unanswered. The constitutional status of the site makes little difference to the many visitors to the site;  their appreciation for what they experience during their visit remains mostly very positive, as shown by the reactions published on Google Maps (see below)

Documentation

* The site on Facebook, with a variety of videos

* Article by Lásló Barkóczy (October 2018) on  website Sonline 

* Article by Iván Viktória (May 2017) on website We Love Balaton

* Article on the website for tourists of the municipality of Balatonboglár

Videos

* On YouTube several videos about Csere and his site are available, mostly Hungarian spoken

* The video The words of Bugaszeg gospel (2017) by László Zadori (YouTube, 13'36") has subtitles in English

 

János Csere

Bugaszeg Estate

Zrínyi utca 72.

8630 Balatonboglár, Hungary

visitors welcome, donation appreciated

Google maps refers to both the Gallery and the Republic; all together there

are thousands of photos from the site to see

Sylvi Hauhia, Veistoksia vesimyllyssä ja galleriassa ja sen ympäristössä / Sculptures in and around a watermill and gallery

pictures courtesy of
Heli Kallio-Kauppinen and Raija Kallioinen

The photo above very well summarizes what the following post is essentially about, namely a mill (symbolized by the grindstone), two sculptures (representing an extensive display of sculpted creations)  and all of this surrounded by a beautiful landscape.

This landscape is depicted in the two images below, where the two sculpted characters, lined up along the edge of the forest, are overlooking the Vaalimaanjoki river in south-east Finland.

Welcome to Sylvia Hauhia's art environment, which is very special, not only because of the hundreds of attractive and captivating sculptures the site includes, but also because of the way they are arranged in a very natural way, both in the landscape and in a variety of buildings.

Life and works

Sylvi Hauhia, born in 1928, grew up in Hauhia, a small village that is part of the municipality of Miehikkälä, with about 1800 inhabitants, located in south-east Finland not far from the border between Finland and Russia. 

Sylvi was 11 years old when the family was evacuated after Russia at the end of November 1939  invaded Finland without a declaration of war. The Winter War, as the battle is called in Finland, ended in mid-March 1940 and Finland had to give up parts of the country. The Salpalinja, the 1200 km defense line along Finland's eastern border, built in the years 1940/44, bisects the municipality of Miehikkälä, which also houses a museum dedicated to the line

Returned to Hauhia, as a teenager Sylvi already felt attracted to making small-scale sculptures from clay.

In 1953, when she was in her mid-20s and had married, she and her husband moved into a house near the mill of Hauhia, located near a rapids named Hauhiankoski (Hauhian Rapids) in the Vaalimaanjoki river,  just outside the village. Her husband was a farmer and Sylvi assisted him in caring for the cattle. 

Currently (2022) in her 90s, Sylvi Hauhia has lived in this area for some seventy years, steadily working on her collection of sculptures, which now includes some thousand creations.

 

Initially Sylvi mainly made small sculptures, as can be seen in the surrounding images, with above a scene of a group of people dancing, perhaps a memory of her wedding or a comparable festivity. 

These and similar scenes fill the shelves of a barn on the premises of the mill, near Sylvi's home, an exposition space opened in the summer of 2021 and referred to as Gallery Sylvi.

The small-scale creations, mainly made of clay, have a benign, sympathetic appearance and are often based on the artist's personal experiences. Sylvi collected the necessary clay by paddling in the rapids and scraping the material from the bottom with her own hands. 

Real handicraft indeed ....

After living in the house near the mill for some time, Sylvi Hauhia started making large-sized sculptures, as the following series of images shows. 

These sculptures, mostly made of cement, currently are partly set up in the outdoor space of the mill and can be freely visited. 

Another part, some hundred sculptures, is exhibited in the courtyard of the mill and in the residential building near the mill, where the collection can be visited (freely) during opening hours. 

The images show that these creations also mainly radiate a good-natured atmosphere, with mostly everyday characters in everyday situations (Sylvi and her husband are the couple shown in the image below right).

The Hauhia mill

The Hauhia watermill dates from 1882 and was created thanks to the carpenter Petter Lundgren and the farmers Emmanuel Hauhia and Erkki Hauhia.  In August 1885 the mill was bought by Sylvester Manikin, who became a respected miller whose company contributed to the food supply in the area.

In the 1920s the mill was equipped with a sawmill and later an electricity generator was installed, which supplied the village with electricity. This machinery is now obsolete and no longer works

In January 2020, Markku Hauhia, a son of Sylvi Hauhia, bought the mill and surroundings, and as part of an environmental project to improve the river basin, the mill was refurbished.

Rearranging the site

Since that purchase, the Hauhia family has worked to give the area around the mill a new allure, promoting the site as an artistic and recreational facility.

The barn at Sylvi's house, in former days a cow house, but currently no more used as such,

reopened in 2021 as Galleria Sylvi Hauhia.

A small coffee shop was installed with some tables and chairs, making a small terrace available to the visitors. Not far from the mill, bicycles and rowing boats can be rented.

The outdoor arrangement of the large sculptures was adapted to the new character of the site.

In January 2022, the Regional Advisory Council for Environmental Policy announced that the Hauhiankosken (Hauhian Rapids) environmental project, which also included the renovation of the mill, was the best environmental project of 2021.

the three young men in the image above are sons of Sylvi Hauhia, 

one of the three is Markku Hauhia

Documentation

* Hauhia village website

* Hauhian Milly on Facebook

* Entry on the website ITE taide

* Entry about the village of Hauhia on the website of the municipality of Miehikkälä

Video

* Video on the Facebook page of Hauhian Mily

Sylvi Hauhia

Sculptures in and around a watermill and gallery

Hauhiantie Road 340 

49700 village of Hauhia, municipality of Miehikkälä, region Southern Finland, Finland

visitors welcome (a donation is appreciated)

info about opening hours of the gallery and the coffee shop 

on the Facebook-page of the site

Google Maps

Joan Carolà, Escultures al bosc / Sculptures in the forest

this picture and the next ones

courtesy of Dominique Clément 

The sculpture of a slightly cross-eyed person pictured above is part of a series of thirty stone sculptures arranged along a sculpture trail in a forest south of the Spanish village of Celrà.

Celrà, a village with about 5000 inhabitants, is located in the Girona region of Catalonia, not far from Spain's border with France.

The sun, pictured above, has played a part in the official records of the village from the seventeenth century to the present day.. On the facade of the local church, completed in 1803, a sun symbol is attached. The sculpture in the forest also expresses the importance of the sun as a symbol for the community.

A rather unknown artist

Little is known about the artist who made these sculptures. He is referred to as Joan Carolà, and his full name is Joan Carolà i Ros. An indication of his date of birth is not available.

There is a video in the documentation about Joan Carolà Ros that presents his creations between 1991 and 2014, both paintings and sculptures. This video however doesn't  have specific information about the year in which the positioning of the sculptures in the forest started.

So there is just a global indication available of the period in which the sculptures were made. Around the turn of the century, seems an acceptable assumption.

In an announcement of an exhibition at a gallery in Girona starting September 2021, Carolà is presented as someone who makes photographic compositions, under the name Yan Visuals. (Hashtag #yan_visuals on Instagram, pictures of the sculpture trail via #joancarola)

In a recent article (April 2022) about the sculptures he is ranked as an art brut artist

The ensemble of sculptures, displayed by Carolà along the trail in the woods for the most part includes depictions of human characters. The sun in the second image from above also has a human face. In the very first image, the halo returns, but then encircling a human head.

The four images above show a very different portrayal of human characters. The busts, placed on pedestals, are reminiscent of the faces of classical philosophers or other dignified persons. The pedestals seem to support the majesty of all these men.

When comparing the four sculptures of the dignified busts of men resting on pedestals with the six sculptures of human characters above, it is noticeable that the four are depicted quite realistically, while the six have some non-realistic features.

In particular the large, wide-open eyes of some persons are noteworthy, but also the wide mouth of the gentleman above on the left and the voluminous hats of the persons above on the right.

It is possible that these six are personalities known in Spain, but in the absence of information on the internet about the background of the people depicted in the sculptures, this post should remain general.

This also applies to the pyramids that line the sculpture trail and which seem to have unrecognizable decorative elements. These sculptures could refer to Mayan culture, but in the absence of background information, the guesswork remains.

Documentation

* Website Records del Moli (December 2018) with a note of sympathy to the creator of the sculptures

* Article on Josep de Tera y Camins' weblog about a walk in the Celrà area, with a series of photos of the sculptures

Videos

* Video (a series of stills) by Joan Ramon Anguera Gil (early 2022, YouTube, 3'24"), with explanatory text by Joan Marcet,

*  Video by Martí Ullastres (camera and editing) about paintings and sculptures by Joan Carolà Ros, 1991-2014 (YouTube, 2014, 12'12", the part about the sculptures starts at 9'10")

Joan Carolà Ros

Sculptures in the forest

in a forest near the community of Celrà, region Girona, Catalonia, Spain

can be visited  freely

streetview with the location of the trail

and a large series of photos

Enrico Menegatti, Sculture nate dal mare / Sculptures born from the sea

 pictures from Menegatti's Facebook page

On the Italian beach of Lido di Volano along the Adriatic Sea, about 100 km south of Venice, is the spot where Enrico Menegatti made and displayed sculptures that he composed from washed up pieces of trees, mainly supplied by the river Po which flows into the sea a little north of the spot.

Life and works

Menegatti was born in 1955 in Codigoro, a municipality of some 13,000 inhabitants (2004) in the Ferrara department in the Emilia-Romagna region. The town is about 15 km inland from the Lido di Volano beach area.

After his primary education, he continued to live in Codigoro. His brother went to Milan in 1973 to study and as a young man Menegatti would have liked to attend an art school, but in order not to burden his family too much, he remained in his native region.

He married and formed a family with children, and he had a job as a diver for land reclamation.

The project sculptures born from the sea started on a summer day in July 2015. He was then 60 years old and not yet retired.

Walking on the beach, Menegatti saw a piece of wood washed up, that looked like the snout of a life-size horse. A few meters away, between a pile of branches, he saw a leg, then another and also the tail.....

After an hour and a half of working in kind of an artistic trance, he had formed a complete horse, held together by rope that had also washed ashore

This was the beginning of a creative project for many years to come.What Menegatti experienced that day in July made him go to the beach to make sculptures every Saturday (he had a job during the week).

By the end of the summer of 2015, he had made twelve sculptures.

Menegatti's way of working is based on his belief that it is not he who directs what is to be created, but that some kind of superior force is taking the lead. 

As he himself has said: I would speak of 'a hand from heaven' if I did not feel ridiculous; but I myself am in the end amazed at the finished work.

Menegatti and his driftwood sculptures became known as early as 2015, when a visiting couple took photos of the sculptures and posted them on Facebook. This resulted in many positive reactions, including a visit by a journalist from a newspaper.

There was also a less positive reaction, when in January 2016 sculptures were destroyed overnight and a month later another sculpture was set on fire, this accompanied by the display of a toy gun and a yellow "death risk" sign, as seen on power pylons.

The police installed a camera, and the images showed two masked men who visited the site at night, but remained unrecognizable. Menegatti was not deterred and continued his creative work. After the police's findings were made public and two exorcists had blessed the site, no further threats were made.

The destruction generally led to a lot of publicity, with one newspaper expressing the involvement of the inhabitants of Codigoro as follows: The vandals destroy and the Lombards reward.

The sculptures that Menegatti made, using only driftwood and iron wire, were generally life-size. 

He created a variety of sculptures of large animals, such as deer with bulky antlers, giraffes, crocodiles, horses and dinosaurs. But he also portrayed human characters, such as San Giorgio and the dragon and San Martino sharing his cloak with a poor man.

In the autumn of 2017, Menegatti's sculptures were exhibited in the park of the Pomposa Abbey, located about halfway between the Lido de Volano and Codigoro. A series of photos of the exhibition, made by Gaia Conventi, is available on Facebook.  After 2017, this park has also become the permanent location of Menegatti's collection. The spot on the beach no longer has that quality.

Also in the Garzaia di Codigoro, a nature reserve in Menegatti's residence, there is an arrangement of a number of Menegatti's sculptures.

Documentation

* Article (January 2016) on the website of Estense TV, mainly about the destruction of sculptures

* Article (June 2021) by Benedetto Colli on website Arbiter

* On Facebook an account entitled Natedalmare Sculture di Enrico Menegatti

Videos

* Video (2'05", Facebook, May 2016) by Luigi Pambianchi 

* Video (2021?) by Telestense Ferrara (YouTube, 2'37")

Enrico Menegatti
sculptures born from the sea
from 2015 during some years the collection was displayed on the beach of Lido di Volano, 

Ferrara, region Emilia-Romagna, Italy

currently Menegatti's collection is displayed in the park of the Pomposa Abbey

.