GLOBE. Photographs of ten towns in Sicily. The exhibition at Palazzo Butera in Palermo – Carlo Franza’s blog

Globe. Photographs of ten towns in Sicilysupported by Strategia Fotografia 2023, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, is a contemporary photographic research project promoted by the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo in partnership with the Palazzo Butera Foundation. Curated by Roberta Valtorta, the project began following the discovery in the Palazzo

Butera, during the restoration work on the main floor, of ten extremely detailed maps of feudal properties of the Branciforte family, corresponding to the towns of Mazzarino, Santa Lucia, Pietraperzia, Niscemi, Barrafranca, Grammichele, Butera, Raccuia, Militello and Scordia. Scattered across four provinces, Caltanissetta, Catania, Enna and Messina, scattered across an agricultural landscape that today shows evident processes of urbanization, the ten cities of the Prince speak both of identities resilient to the transformations that have occurred over time, and of distortion.

Giorgio Barrera, Martina Della Valle, Sebastiano Raimondo, Moira Ricci, Sandro Scalia, Maria Vittoria Trovato they are the six photographers commissioned by the Palermo Academy to produce photographic projects starting from the ten maps. Painted in oil by several artists (to date only one is known, Filippo Giarrusso) around the mid-1700s, these ancient works are bearers of important clues that have allowed a reading of the present and an in situ recognition of the remains, a dialogue with the history and current affairs of places, either with experiential and timely photographic reconnaissance, or with imaginative creations of new landscapes.

The entire corpus of photographs created (twelve prints for each author) will become part of the Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo.

From 30 October to 11 December 2024 an exhibition at Palazzo Butera presents a selection of photographic works created by six authors set up the exhibition itinerary which houses the very rich collection of Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi.

The research work and the works produced are documented in the catalogue edited by Dario Cimorelli with texts by Claudio Gulli, director of Palazzo Butera, Monica Maffioli, photography historian and Roberta Valtorta, photography historian and critic and curator of the project.

In addition to the photographs taken by the six authors, the volume contains images of eighteenth-century maps and some photographs, as a tribute, That Giovanni Chiaramonte – who was also involved in the project but passed away in October 2023 – created in one of these towns, Raccuja, in 1999. «For Giovanni Chiaramonte, Sicily becomes the place of ‘return’ – writes Monica Maffioli in the catalog -, the land which he feels he belongs to and where, not surprisingly, he carries out much of his work both as a photographer and as a teacher at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Palermo, training a generation of Sicilian photographers who have introjected the principles of his intellectual and professional; students who, in some cases, share with the ‘master’ his Sicilian days spent in search of the places of the human story, witnessed by the landscape, nature and living.»

THE WORK OF THE 6 PHOTOGRAPHERS | Giorgio Barrera, Martina Della Valle, Sebastiano Raimondo, Moira Ricci, Sandro Scalia, Maria Vittoria Trovato

«The title ‘World Map’ is not without irony, as Roberta Valtorta underlines in her catalog text. The maps tell us about 10 towns in Sicily and not about the whole world, as does photography, like the we mean today, it could never give us a faithful and complete representation of a territory.

Here, therefore, the hyphen expresses the singularity of this photographic project: it unites but above all distances the map from the worldthat is, the representation of places, the artistic phenomenon, from their phenomenological reality, becomes an expression of the different possibilities visual worlds born from the projects of the six artists involved in this Sicilian work.»

The starting point of the six authors – photographers, Giorgio Barrera, Martina Della Valle, Sebastiano Raimondo, Moira Ricci, Sandro Scalia, Maria Vittoria Trovato, to develop their reflections on the changing territory and on the sense of places over time were therefore 10 fiefdoms of the Branciforte princes of Butera, represented in the ten large and fascinating eighteenth-century maps preserved in Palazzo Butera.

However, it was not a question of “documentation” (a topic already conceptually well explored thanks to the numerous important experiences of public commissioning, now historicised, which took place in Italy and Europe from the early 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s), but of completely free investigations , in a physical and above all mental sense, and of constructions of imaginary, through different design and narrative methods that affirm the absolute subjectivity of representation and the great possibilities of photography to imagine the landscape.

Giorgio Barrera (Cartophotographic) created a polyptych of pictorial appeal with images of only the landscape around the city, and not of the urban agglomeration as happens in ancient maps, questioning the traditional perspective system and creating, through digital collage and the use of artificial intelligence, a visual whole that is credible but does not really exist.

Martina Della Valle (Of ricotta and other things) told “about ricotta and other things” by bringing together very different images (landscapes, ancient traditional objects, ricotta, work tools, sheep, figures of shepherds present in the maps of Palazzo Butera) and arriving at a little theater at the center of which Sicilian ricotta is the protagonist.

Sebastiano Raimondo (The globe of Palazzo Butera) has sought the mystery of places, the traces of history and at the same time the state of things in the contemporary world, collecting solitary fragments of reality, sometimes of iconic value, in a visual wandering with a strong questioning-existential tone.

Moira Ricci (the truth is at stake) invented, through samples from Google street view and artificial intelligence interventions, a contemporary Sicilian town inhabited by figurines, similar to a nativity scene, with the signs of uncontrolled urbanization and destruction of the territory, a “similar” place, but absolutely non-existent.

Sandro Scalia (The Branciforte legacy) has made long and meticulous journeys to identify symbolic points in the anthropized landscape, including Palazzo Butera itself, underlining the importance, in photography, of the encounter with places and of repeated returns.

TO Maria Vittoria Trovato (PRG) we must carry out a straightforward “topographic” exploration of a series of current municipal offices in some of these towns (so different from the Palazzo), in search of plans linked to the master plans which above all show the contemporary urban expansion, in an important comparison between yesterday’s maps and today’s maps.

Carlo Franza