Pietro Motisi

"Cemento" is the Italian word for concrete, a well known and common material used for building purposes but interestingly in the English language it is also an adjective used to describe something as real, solid and existent in both the senses, materially and conceptually. Cemento is a project to build a map, an original path of sensations about a land. Its purpose is to follow what the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri was calling “a zig zag path to follow inside a given environment with the intention of building a map of places with all their characteristics and problematics”. This project wants to be a new map of Sicily, about Sicily and its citizens. With the purpose of showing this place from a new perspective, something that is different from the clichés that always existed as the only point of view about the island. Of course there is still abuse, there is still mafia, there are still many of the bad ingredients that are already famous worldwide, but there is also a particular care for the representation of the landscape which is itself unique and full of incredible energy, something like a culture of the landscape that in Sicily was lost since the beginning of the last century with painters like Francesco Lojacono and Michele Catti. The lands are photographed as empty places, as the photographer went in a house when the owner wasn’t in, there is a research for something like a detail, something like a sensation able to give back not just the shape of something, but also the physiognomy of the people that lived in the place and been responsible for the signs the land holds in its surface and beyond. After the second war the Italian writer Italo Calvino in its book “the unauthorized buildings” described the Italians as “antiaesthetic” and “antimoral” people involved in activities of abuse of the land. Today the process is still on and deeply radicated in our society, especially in the south. Cemento wants to forget the habits of sight, put the eyes on the everyday violence of the landscape that became part of normality for most of the people as well as examples of contemporary landart present in the island, artworks mainly made of concrete that create a strange and interesting clush between art and daily life in a land full of high contrasts. En cours.

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