Historical Museum of the Landing in Sicily 1943
MEMORY LAPSES
Sicily 1943: Today's Images
Photo by Massimo Siragusa
With a sound work by Michele Spadaro
REFLECTION IN TIME
Goodness knows why, but this is where I find myself starting every time. From this countryside, from these barren and windy hills in the centre of Sicily. The sound of a flock in the distance, the smell of wet earth and the clouds disappearing on the horizon. The Canadian cemetery in Agira is a little pearl set on a hill a few kilometres from the town. A row of white tombstones emerges from the green of the lawn. A magical place, fascinating I would say. This is the place I have chosen to begin my journey down memory lane. It seemed to me that a cemetery was the most symbolically significant starting point to describe a war and, at the same time, I needed to make my own the entire dimension of the tragedy experienced in those years. Of grief, destruction and death. Of course, telling the story of an event that happened 80 years ago in images might seem like a lost cause from the start. To most people, photography still appears as an exercise aimed at showing what exists. In a trip down memory lane, however, photography linked to places offers a good vantage point. We must think of the area as a theatre of events. A stage, where one-to-one relationships are constructed between those who live in a place and the place itself, in a course of continuous exchange. I like to imagine that this exchange, this one-to-one relationship, acts both in parallel, in the contemporary world, and vertically, on the plane of time. As if the land retained a trace, a memory of the past, similar to a process of homeopathic dynamization. In which case the photographer becomes an archaeologist. He digs for signs.
Massimo Siragusa
Photographer
When the Contemporary
Meets Memory
A current interpretation, a sign of today that harks back to a summer that changed history, an imprint — one that no wave can ever erase — impressed 80 years ago by a young American photoreporter, nowadays respectfully and freely retraced by the photographer Massimo Siragusa. In this spirit -that motivates the choices of Fondazione Oelle Mediterraneo Antico ET — that the controversial relationship between present-day sites and their sonic memories finds its synthesis in the work of sound artist Michele Spadaro. RESPECT: for the places that still bear the brutal marks of a past always too close and possible; FREEDOM: to redesign spaces with a contemporary and clear vision thanks to that light beyond evil which humanity, nowadays more than ever, yearns.
Ornella Laneri
President Fondazione OELLE Mediterraneo Antico Ets
Between history and memory
History, made with documents, sometimes creates voids that can never be filled. For this reason, our memory comes to us, which becomes the document of our soul, wandering through the rubble of time. Memory as a trace of the past- personal memories, deposited in the minds of individuals, full of myths, affections and passions. It is a relative of the truth but not its twin, a blood relative of history but an individual. A memory that takes shape and meaning for everything that remains, and is still visible, of that 1943 time period in Sicily. This is how the signs on the walls of the buildings, the battlefields and the bunkers that breathe anguish and apprehension, the objects that have accompanied the sleepless nights of the people are able to communicate. And then the sounds- of the wind flowing across the ruins, of the labored breaths that still pervade the spaces of the war and the waves of the sea- carriers of freedom. Contemporary spaces of our Mediterranean, observed outside the boundaries of time. Centuries of life that capture natural elements that have had influence to become and thus enter history as inalienable aspects of its narrative. The history, which looks reality in the face, and memory, which represents the past for extrapolation, are the essence of this photographic journey that Massimo Siragusa provides us with along the paths of the war in Sicily. Places imbued with restlessness but also with extraordinary landscape and visual beauty, pervaded by sounds that come to us from afar and that Michele Spadaro, with his sound work, returns us to today through an aural, sensory exploration of past times, full of curiosity, but even more restlessness than the present. The whole fragments oblivion. Time and history are filled with imagination, in the constant dialogue between the artist and the world around him.
Ezio Costanzo
Historian and curator of the exhibition
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