Welcome

Welcome to the world of SpicaHome

The idea of SpicaHome was born of a wish to gather in one place everything I have found valuable over the years: stories, images, objects and human thoughts. Things with real substance behind them – creative work, cultural heritage, or simply a story worth passing on.

My path has always led between different forms of beauty. For ten years I trained to be a ballerina; later I learned to draw, and then photography became my calling.

As a young woman, working alongside the photographer Benda Iván, I learned to truly see. Not only light, movement or the human face, but also what lies behind them all. Iván came from a Jewish family, and one of the defining places of his art became Jerusalem – the city where our Jewish and Christian roots meet in a remarkable way. In his book Élő Jeruzsálem (Living Jerusalem), too, he showed a many-faceted world in which different religions, traditions and human destinies live side by side.

He taught me more than photography.

He also taught me that we do better to approach one another with curiosity rather than prejudice, looking for the person rather than our differences. To step into another’s world with respect. To dare to stay sensitive, and to notice the purity that can live in a person regardless of rank, origin or religion.

It took many years for me to realise how much of what I received then is still with me today.

Perhaps this is where SpicaHome begins, too.

The founding idea is personal, but SpicaHome is no longer only about me. People, encounters, shared thinking and creative work have shaped it into what it is today – so when we speak in the plural on these pages, that “we” includes everyone who has added something to this story with their knowledge, talent, work, or simply their trust.

We build on the conviction that there are values worth not only preserving, but also passing on.

Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage has lived for centuries in our culture, our art, our feasts, our homes and in our simplest human gestures. Love, human dignity, peace, hope, attentiveness to and responsibility for one another are not memories of the past for us. They are living values that have a place in the present and are worth carrying with us into the future.

Iván once said that our task is to translate the past into the language of the generations that come after us.

This thought is especially close to my heart.

In a way, this is what we hope to do with SpicaHome as well: to keep something of what we received as a treasure, and pass it on in the language of the present. Through a story, a photograph, a work of art or even a small gift. Not with grand words, but with beauty, attentiveness and things that have a real thought behind them.

Because I believe a heritage stays alive when we not only take care of it, but add something of ourselves and then pass it on.

For me, SpicaHome is the place of this passing on.

I’m glad you’re here.