Text by Örs Csete

My father, György Csete, architect, passed away in 2016, my mother, Ildikó Csete, textile artist, in 2018. They were artists, or at least they lived their whole lives under the spell of art, wondering, suffering, playing, loving, creating.

My artist parents have left to this earthly world nearly a hundred completed private and public buildings and hundreds of textiles. In their former apartment on Nárcisz Street in Buda, their legacy includes thousands of drawings and designs, six thousand books, thirty-five thousand slides and photographs on paper, thousands of letters, invitations to and posters for around one hundred and thirty exhibitions, and half a thousand press articles about them, one and a half hundred individual textile works, almost a hundred essays and texts of opening speeches, dozens of personal objects, clothes, calendars, telephone diaries, electricity bills, a crate of medals, a lock of hair from their childhood and many other memories. Objects and documents which, because of their material nature, are ephemeral: in many cases they outlive their creator, their former owner, by two or three generations. They carry secrets: they could explain a life’s work, justify gestures, answer questions. Fragments, fragments: puzzle pieces of the life and art of György and Ildikó Csete Csete.

My parents had no say in the fate of this life’s journey of a hundred and five metres of shelves. The easiest thing would be to throw it all away, here and now, with one less thing to worry about, at the most, to be accounted for over there. But I’m not sure it would be much better if the objects and documents they left us were to go into a public collection – most likely to gather dust in a warehouse alongside the legacy of others waiting to be processed. Will we never find out what the big jigsaw puzzle represents?

Of course, I’ve started to work on it: for years I’ve been putting together the giant puzzle of my artist parents’ lives. With the knowledge of a witness who knows the events and the characters intimately, with the experience of an ethnographer who has made books out of human life stories, with the love of a child. In my writing, I report on this legacy work.