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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.
