Artist statement

In his essay La luce e il lutto, Gesualdo Bufalino defined insularity as a blend of sacredness, mythological echoes, and theatrical survival. It is, he suggests, a constant coexistence of mourning’s sorrow and the stirring anticipation of imminent rebirth. Sicily remains incomprehensible until one understands that its very essence is intimately bound to the geographical and temporal fabric of its space. It is a land entirely encircled by the sea — a place of arrival, yet also a boundary; an ancestral vessel holding a humanity suspended between the most disparate dichotomies.

In this strange and paradoxical silence tinged with chaos, one often feels lost — on an island steeped in darkness and in a light almost shameless in its brilliance. It is a prelude to death and unrest, yet softened by a surreal warmth: human, mystical, elusive, and yet tangible, embracing.

In Sicily, extremes coexist. Stark contrasts and elusive dichotomies are ancestrally woven into a common thread, one that brushes the lives of those who dwell on the island and gently beguiles those who are merely passing through. Here, insularity becomes a visceral part of a greater cosmos. It continually redefines itself as a being in its own right, yet also as the sum of all its roots.

It is as if, in this land that confuses and disarms, light could not shine unless it cast itself into the depths, drifting through irrational and nameless emotions. And in trying to understand it, one is left alone, adrift.

Likewise, one may seeks either to find oneself or to flee.

Bufalino, speaking of Sicily, wrote:

“the entire island is a mixture of mourning and light. [...] The result of all this, when one cannot or does not wish to flee the island, is an emphatic solitude. [...] It is as if, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, two sirens were to rise in the wake of the ship and tempt you with opposite enticements. One is celestial, speaking of Arabian jasmines, moonlit joys, beaches like golden cheeks. The other is dark, infernal, with blinding noons hanging over sun-scorched trails and blood that dries slowly at the roots of an old olive tree. In the dialogue between these two voices, in their encounter and clash, in their consonance and dissonance, lies the painful secret and the richness of our history.”

Isula is an invitation to journey inward, a call to probe the depths of one's roots. It is a return to the placenta where we were once cradled, a rediscovery of its essence, a blending once more with its sap, reaching the substratum — mutable and elusive — which holds the root of a solitude that, however alienating or painful it may seem, often reveals itself as a place of peace, a space for reflection, for exploration, for meditative reconciliation.

The outcome of this search is a mirrored encounter with the island, a renewed discovery that she is mater, our cradle, the placenta from which we are unable to escape, as we resist both its mourning and the slow rhythm of separation.

In the scorched gaze of my island, I have found that mourning once again, but also a new light: the awareness of being eternally her child, in that place where my contradictions still survive. And there lies the answer to why we islanders live with the chaotic feeling of having been born free, yet bound to a suffocating cord.