The Work That Remains

There is a house in almost every painting Mikaela Olovsdotter has made. Small, precise, set against sky or water or open field. Never grand. Never the whole story — but always present, like a quiet fact the painting refuses to argue with.

Two houses appear in Togetherness — red roofs, white walls, a vivid green field stretching toward a sea that is almost too blue to be real. The sky behind them is heavy with weather that hasn’t arrived yet. It is her favourite of her own paintings, which tells you something. There is warmth in it, and also exposure. The houses stand close together, facing the same direction. They are not seeking shelter. They are simply there.

Last year, a woman in Sweden bought a large painting of a field — a narrow road running straight toward the horizon, yellow flowers pressing in on both sides, and one small house with a red roof sitting quietly at the far right, almost at the edge of the canvas. It is a painting about distance and about arriving. The woman who bought it has it on her wall now. The painting found its place.

Then there is The Quiet House.

It is unlike anything else Mikaela has painted. Grey — almost entirely grey — a small house on a fragment of land surrounded by still water, the sky and its reflection nearly indistinguishable from each other. A yellow door. A white boat with a red trim resting at the water’s edge. The colour exists, but only just. Everything else has been quietly removed.

She dreamed the painting before she made it. Woke up with it already formed, already finished in her mind. And then she painted it in a single afternoon — something that had never happened before. Her paintings normally take weeks. Layers of consideration, revision, return. This one arrived whole and left no room for doubt.

After The Quiet House, she stopped painting.

Not dramatically. Not with announcement. The brush simply became still, and the weeks passed, and the canvas stayed empty. More than a year now. Artists have seasons, and some of them are long. Some paintings take something out of you on their way through — particularly the ones that arrive in dreams, the ones that don’t ask permission.

There is a particular quality to work made just before a long silence. You can feel it in The Quiet House — the reduction, the restraint, the sense of a painter moving inward rather than outward. The yellow door is the only thing that insists on being seen. Everything else is content to wait.

The work that exists is enough to look at for a long time. Togetherness rewards patience — the more you sit with it, the more weather you notice, the more you feel the particular quality of light before a storm that doesn’t come. The field painting is somewhere in Sweden, doing its quiet work on a wall. And The Quiet House remains — a painting that came through a dream and was finished in an afternoon by a painter who normally takes weeks.

The next painting will come when it comes.

Anna, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art is available here.

Mikaela Olovsdotter Artwork you can see here.

Images courtesy of the Tichý Ocean Foundation tichyocean.com

Miroslav Tichý — The Outsider Artist

Watching Tarzan Retired — Roman Buxbaum’s 2004 documentary portrait of Miroslav Tichý — is where this account begins. What the film reveals is not easily forgotten.

An eccentric old man enters his home, his clothes worn to rags, his beard and hair untouched for what seems like ages. To an outsider, the house appears to be a pure disaster, a kingdom ruled by chaos. He lived in poverty, on the margins of society. Photographs lay scattered everywhere — stuffed into shelves, boxes, and drawers — while old paintings, buried beneath layers of dust, had slowly turned grey with time. This was a man who seemed to hold nothing of importance, someone who believed the world itself was an illusion, built entirely on appearances.

Each day, he set out on his walks — not simply to let time pass, but carrying with him his homemade camera. He photographed the everyday world, a world where everything already existed, and pressed the shutter release almost instinctively. Over the course of five years, he is said to have taken nearly one hundred photographs a day. Later, in the solitude of the darkroom, he would study them beneath an enlarger.

His films were developed in buckets or in a bathtub during the night in his courtyard. Some negatives were left submerged for hours; sometimes days passed before he returned to them. Afterwards, he hung them on a laundry line to dry. Yet even then, the photographs held little importance to him. It was simply something he did, almost without thought or ambition. And still, through this careless devotion, he transformed the ordinary into art.

There is a saying that the line between sanity and madness is as thin as a strand of hair. Miroslav Tichý lived somewhere along that fragile border. Born in Czechoslovakia under communist rule, his life was far from easy — shaped by harsh times and by a society that treated him as an outsider. He believed that perfection in something beautiful holds no interest for the eye. It is the imperfection that becomes more interesting, more human, more true. His neighbours saw him as eccentric, sometimes a nuisance. He was indifferent to fame or recognition. He barely preserved his own work — photographs scattered across floors and shelves, left to curl, decay, or burn in his stove for warmth.

Tichý never sought an audience. He never curated, never archived, never explained himself. That any of it survived is largely due to Roman Buxbaum — a childhood friend and Czech-Swiss psychiatrist who returned from exile in Switzerland in 1981 and discovered thousands of handmade prints and cameras scattered across Tichý’s home. Where Tichý saw nothing worth keeping, Buxbaum saw a life’s work. He spent the next two decades preserving and organizing the collection, and later documented their story in Tarzan Retired, his 2004 portrait of the man he had known since youth. It was the curator Harald Szeemann who ultimately brought Tichý’s work to the international stage — introducing it to the world at the 2004 Seville Biennial. His photographs exist because two people understood their value before the world did.

“Photography is something concrete. Photography is perception, the eye — that which you can see. To achieve that you need a bad camera. Photography means painting with light.” (Miroslav Tichý — Tarzan Retired, 2004, dir. Roman Buxbaum)

Anna, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art is available here.

Photography: Serdar Öner @photoserdar

The Sound of Silence

There are images that capture a moment. And then there are images that seem to exist outside of time altogether. Images where the horizon cannot quite be seen, yet its presence lingers somewhere beyond the fog. The mist softens the landscape into something almost mythical, carrying its own quiet weight. It promises something we cannot yet name, something just beyond language, but deeply felt.

Nature has the rare ability to slow us down. It asks us to listen, to observe what we may once have taken for granted. Its rhythm is different from the rhythm of the city. Slower, quieter, more patient. Nature moves according to its own time, and we are only a small part of it.

Serdar Öner, whose work appears in the current issue of Houses & Art, spends long periods immersed in nature. That patience is visible throughout his work. His photographs are not captured in haste; they are shaped by waiting, walking, and returning again and again to the same places. They reveal a relationship built over time, a quiet dialogue between photographer and landscape. In each image, you can sense his deep affection for both nature and the act of observing it.

There is a Japanese practice known as Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing — the idea of entering a forest not simply to walk through it, but to be absorbed by it. Serdar’s photographs invite the viewer to do the same. You do not simply look at them; you step into them. You feel the cold air, the stillness, the presence of water and fog. They awaken the desire to disappear into those landscapes, if only for a moment.

There is a particular kind of silence in the north, especially in Sweden. A silence filled with texture: the soft movement of fog across water, the distant suggestion of something unseen.

Perhaps nothing here asks to be fully understood or explained. Some things are simply meant to be felt.

Anna, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art is available here.

Photography: Carlo Arancio, Sicily in Decay Exhibition

Sicily in Decay

There are houses in Sicily that no one has entered for decades — and yet, nothing inside them has been forgotten. Many times over the years I have passed by Villa Consoli Marano on Via Etnea in Catania, and it has always given me the impression of being frozen in time. I have always wondered, with a curious mind, who lived there — and what the history of the villa truly is.

Villa Consoli Marano, built between 1870 and 1939, has two main volumes linked by a beautiful pavilion in iron and glass, with a long balcony facing the main street. The villa is one of its kind — a huge garden, a chalet, two smaller buildings. It reflects a time of aesthetic ambition in Catania.

A question that lingers in me is: should we leave old buildings in their own decay, or should we restore them? Historic buildings are part of a city’s history, and we all have a part in that. They evoke a curiosity — a wanting to know more about what has been, who lived there, and how. Old buildings have a rare beauty that we do not see in modern architecture. They have a soul, a presence, and still something to say. Waiting for us to listen.

I met Carlo Arancio on a late summer afternoon, with friends, a couple of summers ago — standing in front of his photography exhibition in the centre of Catania. His work stopped me completely. He is not directly linked to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in a historical or biographical sense, but his work forms a powerful contemporary dialogue with Lampedusa’s legacy. Through his photography — particularly in projects like Sicily in Decay — Arancio visually explores themes that lie at the heart of The Leopard.

Lampedusa’s novel captures the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy during the 19th century, portraying a world of fading grandeur, social transformation, and quiet resignation. Arancio’s images echo this atmosphere by documenting abandoned palaces, decaying interiors, and remnants of noble life across Sicily. His work can be seen as a modern visual extension of the novel’s emotional landscape — translating literary themes into tangible, present-day imagery.

Arancio’s connection is interpretive rather than direct. He does not continue the story, but instead reveals how its core ideas — decay, memory, and the passage of time — still persist in Sicily today. Through his photography, he gives us back a history of Sicily that might otherwise disappear, and invites us to see it with new eyes.

The question of what to do with these buildings is not unique to Sicily. In Sweden, there is a strong tradition of protecting old buildings while keeping them useful in modern life. The approach is not about freezing everything in time — it is about careful preservation, adaptation, and respect for history. In Sicily, history often lingers in a more fragile state — beautiful, layered, and sometimes decaying — revealing the passage of time rather than resisting it.

Old buildings leave us with a history we are all connected to, in one way or another.

Anna, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art is available here.

Decoration vs Atmosphere

The sun moves slowly across the floor, and the room changes without being touched. With bare feet I walk through it, feeling the difference — cold cement where the light hasn’t reached, warmth where it has. The birds outside are singing. The espresso machine whispers Buongiorno. A scent of coffee spreads quietly through the room. I sit down, and let the silence hold me.

The view is never the same as yesterday. The window — endless in its circular shape, no beginning, no end — frames something that is constantly moving and yet remains timeless. I made a deliberate decision to place nothing there. Just the window, and what it shows. In Japanese aesthetics, there is a name for this understanding — the idea that a room speaks not only through what it contains, but through what it chooses to leave untouched.

The beauty in simple things is called Wabi-sabi. To see the beauty in the bare, the natural, and the imperfect. Where the light is soft, the materials are honest, and nothing feels forced. In the space where nothing happens but everything can be felt, we talk about Ma. Decoration fills surfaces — ma gives them meaning. In what is natural and taken for granted lives Shizen: the light, the trees, the view outside the window.

Imagine a set dinner table with Sicilian ceramics, candlelight and freshly picked flowers, outside on a terrace on a late summer afternoon. A soft breeze in the air, the sun not yet ready to set. A nonna has made dinner for you and your friends. The table is full. Overwhelming for the eyes and the senses — a Mediterranean dream, with nature as its quiet observer.
The same table can be just as beautiful with only a single transparent vase, a straw resting inside it. Wabi-sabi makes itself present. Ma, without words, lets Shizen exist.

It’s not a room that wants to be seen. It’s a room that lets you see.

Anna Posa, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art is available here.

What This Magazine Is

It is 2026, and the third issue of Houses & Art is finished. It contains photographs of spaces that hold their silence well. And it carries, somewhere between the pages, the particular quality of light that belongs to both the far north and the deep south — different in every way, and yet, somehow, looking for the same thing.

The theme of this issue is decay. Not as loss, but as evidence. Last summer, on an unexpected night out in Sicily, I walked into an exhibition by Carlo Arancio — and found him standing there. His photographs of old Sicilian buildings stopped me. Not because they were ruins, but because they were honest. Time had made its mark, and the mark was beautiful. That was the moment I knew what this issue had to be about.

From there, the issue found its own shape. Serdar Öner photographs southern Sweden with a stillness that makes you pause — nature reclaiming space, light falling on things that have been left alone. Mikaela Olovsdotter puts colour on canvas the way a painter does when they’ve looked at something long enough to feel it. Miroslav Tichy built his own camera from scraps, and made art anyway — proof that a creative mind finds no limits. And at Casa Militello, tradition is not a memory. It lives in the hands that pick olives from the trees, season after season.

The door isn’t closed. It’s still open. All the work is done — the editing, the layout, the long hours of getting it right — and the magazine is ready to be seen. I’m proud of what went into this issue. I hope it makes you stop, even for a moment, and look.

“The lost, once found, is not forgotten. It is honored by its presence.”

Anna Posa, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art 2026 is available here.

There is a room in a house I once visited in Sicily where nothing happened. No furniture arranged for conversation, no art demanding attention. A chair near a window. Light moving slowly across a pale wall. I stood in the doorway for longer than made sense, and I did not want to go in — not because the room was unwelcoming, but because entering it felt like it would disturb something.

Some places deserve the respect of being left alone. The room had grown into its own stillness over time. Dust caught in the sunlight. Dust moving slowly across the floor. The kind of quiet that takes decades to build.

Then I noticed footprints. Somebody had been here — not yesterday, but not so long ago either. The room was not as abandoned as it appeared. A man, by the size of the marks. I stood in the doorway wondering about him. His relation to this room. What brought him here, and whether he hesitated the way I did. He had entered. I did not.

Does an empty room have a soul? I found myself wondering. I have been to places where something stopped me at the threshold — not fear exactly, but a sense that the space belonged to someone else, to another time, to a story I had no part in. You feel it before you understand it.

I think of my Swedish oak kitchen table. Twenty-five years old, still solid, still the centre of the room. It has held arguments and dinners, ordinary mornings and important evenings. The marks on its surface are not damage — they are a record.

Once, in Sicily, I met an old man who showed me his kitchen table with the same quiet pride. His mother had given birth to him and his siblings on that table. It had witnessed weddings and funerals, joy and grief. He ran his hand across certain marks and named the year each one belonged to. Over an espresso, he told me all of this, and I have carried it with me since.

Some things outlive us. Some things pass to the next generation carrying everything that happened to them. My grandparents lived in the same home for nearly sixty years. The interior never changed — same furniture, same paintings, same smell that greeted you every time you walked through the door. That constancy was not neglect. It was a gift. Returning there always felt like returning to something stable in a world that kept moving.

A room. A table. A chair near a window.

What we make with our hands, and with care, has a way of holding time.

Anna Posa, Sicily 2026

There is a version of every project that no one sees.

It exists before layout.

Before print.

Before the cover is photographed and placed under careful light.

It is the version made of hesitation, erasure and rearrangement.

The Invisible Layer

Houses & Art does not begin when something is published.

It begins long before that — in the quiet work of deciding what should not be published.

In a culture that rewards speed, visibility and constant output, restraint can feel counterintuitive. But publishing, at least in the way I understand it, is not about producing more. It is about holding back until something feels necessary.

Restraint is not absence.

It is precision.

The Decisions No One Sees

The notebook you see.

The magazine pages.

The typography placed deliberately on a blank field.

All of it is preceded by decisions that remain invisible.

Paper weights tested and rejected.

Margins adjusted by millimeters.

Sentences written and removed.

Images almost included — then withdrawn.

The work before the work is slow.

It requires silence.

And silence is increasingly rare.

The Ethical Layer

There is a responsibility in publishing something — even something small. When an object enters the world, it carries a statement about value. About attention. About what deserves to exist physically.

That responsibility is why Houses & Art moves carefully.

Not because it cannot move faster.

But because it chooses not to.

Creative work is often romanticized. The studio light. The finished spread. The reveal. But what interests me more is the unseen layer — the ethical layer. The moment when you ask:

Is this necessary?

Does this contribute?

Is this aligned with what we believe?

Sometimes the most important work is not what we add, but what we remove.

The work before the work is where identity is formed.

And if it is done properly, the final object feels inevitable.

Not promotional.

Not loud.

Just right.

That is the space Houses & Art chooses to operate in.

Before the release.

Before the announcement.

Before the visible moment.

In the quiet construction.

---

Anna Posa

Founder, Houses & Art

Read Houses & Art Magazine