Eros e Psyche is a project by Renato Leotta, curated by Claudio Gulli and Pietro Scammacca, conceived for the village of Centuripe and its landscape. A widespread exhibition composed of archaeological and archaic images, located in the rural and urban context of the Enna village. The title recalls a terracotta statuette of Eros and Psyche embracing (about 200 -100 BC), found in Centuripe and currently part of the British Museum collection. After a period of research on the centuripine manufacture and the complex history of the archaeological events linked to it, Leotta has orchestrated an en plen air museum itinerary composed of posters representing a selection of centuripine finds that are part of the British Museum collection, thus imagining a hypothetical temporary section of the Regional Archaeological Museum.
The project is not moved by a simple territorial claim of these finds, but wants to question the ways in which archeology and cultural heritage become part of «identity» mechanisms. Throughout its history, archeology has often been exploited for reasons of cultural diplomacy and as a support to colonial narratives. In this case, Leotta’s intervention instead proposes a possible form of union through the theme of beauty, an embrace that echoes the events of Amor and Psyche, between the characters of the human and the divine.

The works of Renato Leotta (Turin, 1982) come from a careful and prolonged observation of a place or a landscape. In his search for the boundaries and limits of the two-dimensionality of the image, he often refers to literature in the choice of the titles of his works and in the texts that accompany his exhibitions. Among his most recent solo exhibitions are: ‘Sole’, Castello di Rivoli, in 2020 and in 2019, at the Magazzino Italian Art Foundation and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in New York. In 2019, he won the Italian Fellows American Academy Award in Rome.