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Nature, Art, ACTIVISM 237
Magdolna Toth
‘T guess my works are not really attention-grabbing; they respond to the problem
more subtly, not ostentatiously.”
As a result of my research project, Once there was a village, | composed two works:
Cabbage garden and Poultry yard. Both call attention to the problem raised in the
title: where has the rural peasant culture gone and which decisive motifs of it are
still with us? Both works highlight a disappearing form of household farming and
at the same time reflect on ecological questions in their discourse on the possibilities
of sustainability and self-subsistence. I have shown several of my works at exhibitions
and conferences, so that in line with their purpose, they could call attention to
the pertinent problems and initiate dialogues.
Cabbage garden is an indoors installation, a genre scene as it were: it shows my
mother’s figure in the garden gathering slugs in a plastic bag at night with a
headlamp on her head, to protect the vegetables from the harm they cause. Though
it might be absurd, startling or surrealistic at first sight, the scene is an ordinary
event of everyday life for those with a kitchen garden. This scene reports on the
upsetting of our delicate relationship with our environment and with nature caused
by the recent invasive newcomers in Hungary, the Spanish slugs, which — for lack
of natural predators — can proliferate without limits. Beyond the ecological and
ethical issues raised, the work is also about my relationship with my mother: as
the protector of vegetables, she also protects me, as I’ve had an aversion to slugs
from my early childhood. Her work is almost invisible; it surrounds us like air,
protecting and building on the family. The slugs also mainly work invisibly, at
night, only for the damage to be revealed by the morning light.
My work Poultry yard is an outdoors installation consisting of twelve cast
concrete hens. The work also retrieves a decisive memory of the village with hens
scratching the ground on the side of the ditch, an ordinary sight in my childhood.
The work offers its message with the setting, maybe generating an absurd or, for
that matter, harmonious effect, by calling attention to the under-utilization of
green surfaces and public spaces, the pertinent restrictions, as well as the perversities
of industrial-scale poultry breeding. The sight of hens fills the insipid or indifferent
spaces with life — it was the sight of pigeons pecking at scraps on the unused grass
outside the polyclinic in Lanc street, Pécs, that gave me the first inspiration for
making this work. Besides, I like hens for their natural social and curious nature.
In earlier times, all green surfaces were used in the villages for grazing. I think it
is a promising tendency that people gradually realize the significance of these areas
and create bee pastures in some places.
Magdolna Toth, Pécs, 2022.°!
31 The research was supported by UNKP-21-2-1-PTE-1102.