This work is about a small village, Kóspallag, in the Börzsöny mountains, it is a documentary, but it is based on very subjective experiences. What I experience here has a special power, the landscape creates order and people adapt to it in the hope of a more sustainable future.

Although I have similar experiences since in my family, farming, gardening and animal husbandry play an important role, but here the bond between nature and man is really close. Of course, maybe it’s just because I can see all this from the outside, so it is often a precarious process, because I am an outsider. The fact that I am taking photographs of people, landscapes, and still life is less pronounced.

I’m more and more embedded here, community and individual destinies are forming in front of my eyes and I want to be part of that. I don’t know what came first, that it would be good to live here, or that what is here should be immortalised. Obviously, the eye that sees more, more intimately, is the privilege of the locals, but that is not my task for the moment; I infuse the land, the house, the landscape, the rural tranquillity with my own emotions. In this, the trust of the people of Kóspallag helps me a lot.

(2020 – ongoing)

Unfamiliarity or the sense of being at home… One can find themselves on the – sometimes very thin – line between these two feelings when opening up the album of László Gábor Belicza that he created of Kóspallag. He draws our eyes towards faces, landscapes, gestures, touches. But how can the active presence of a community be captured by a machine, from the perspective of a stranger, a newcomer? Who do these images tell us more about – the world in front of the lens or the person behind the camera? To what end does he have this persistent and sensitive attention?

I could not answer all these questions, because I keep coming back to others: what nuances can time incorporate? What if it is not just moments that have passed that are captured in these photographs? What if, through a single year of quiet contemplation, he managed to make visible something truly essential of the fleeting beauty and indestructible nature of life?

– Éva Bonczidai, dramaturgist