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.