Records

Sicily, in Fragments

I moved to Sicily a few years ago. Coming from the continent, I found that living here offers daily experiences of awe and despair, beauty and desolation: opposing qualities and perceptions in constant tension. In the end, beauty and awe always prevail. Sicily is an island of extreme polarities, and this is part of the extraordinary power it exercises over those who encounter it.

But what is Sicily? After living here for some time, I began to ask myself this question. Is it Palermo and Catania, its largest cities? Is it Taormina, where the island presents itself as it wishes to be seen and remembered by the thousands of visitors who pass through it every day? Is Sicily its coast or its interior, the Iblean Mountains or the Nebrodi? However long I looked, I could find no single image of Sicily. I found only fragments of meaning belonging to something larger: pieces of a whole whose mereological unity one may attempt to collect and reconstruct, while remaining aware that they do not form a jigsaw puzzle. No final image can ever be complete, coherent, or unitary.

This project contains my collection of fragments of Sicily. It should be taken for what it is: a collection. It is neither a travel guide nor a touristic reportage. It is a personal study of Sicily through its constituent parts. The project remains open. It documents my attempt to understand Sicily and, through it, the land and people that have welcomed me. It is at once a photographic sequence and an epistemic journey, with no end yet in sight. For this reason, I am fairly certain that what you find here will be different from what I found. The places are arranged alphabetically, resisting any attempt to turn the collection into a route, hierarchy, or coherent narrative.