Irene Macalli
Qui il vento ricorda per noi
a cura di Giulia Monroy
Irene Macalli, L’arte come riscatto sociale nei piccoli comuni, 2024. Collective installation, embroidered flag, polyester, galvanized iron, 600 x 200 cm. Ph Maddalena Tartaro
"The wind becomes a poetic image: memories mingle within it, as if reaching toward the sky, in a place where depopulation calls for acceptance, for those who stay and those who leave."
The project emerges from the encounter with Ficarra’s community and from the desire to transform collective memory into a shared and living experience. Drawing upon the book Ficarra libro mio, the artist reactivates a participatory process by inviting residents to contribute with words, marks and images painted on transparent surfaces. These “tiles of memory” come together in a public installation conceived for Piazza delle Logge, where light and wind become narrative elements.
The work takes shape as a space for meeting and contemplation, capable of connecting past and future. In a context marked by depopulation, the project restores centrality to relationships, envisioning new ways of inhabiting through art and participation.
In parallel, the artist collaborates with local stone-carving artisans to create a sculptural work engraved with a significant phrase from the book. From the encounter with Maestro Delfio Plantemoli emerges a sound installation that reinterprets a poem from the text through traditional Sicilian instruments and rural songs in an experimental key.
Here the Wind Remembers for Us. A workshop for those who stayed and those who left.
12 - 14 June 2026, h. 10:00
Ex Scuola Media C.da Natoli, via Natoli 15, Ficarra (ME)
Three days of meetings with the artist Irene Macalli to reactivate the sense of co-creation that emerged in 2012 with Ficarra libro mio. Participants will rediscover their connection to the local territory, transforming the memory of the book into a new shared creative process. The workshop will involve writing and drawing on transparent tiles using glass paints. These future memories will then be symbolically lifted into the wind through the installation Qui il vento ricorda per noi, conceived for Piazza delle Logge.
TBC
Irene Macalli (Sant’Agata de’ Goti, 1999) is an artist trained in sculpture, with formative experiences at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (MSGSU) in Istanbul and in the studios of artists Marisa Albanese and Gian Maria Tosatti. She is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples. Her research focuses on small rural communities through participatory projects developed in collaboration with local populations. She is the initiator and founder of the project L’arte come riscatto sociale nei piccoli comuni, which led to the publication of a book by Giacovelli Editore and to her solo exhibition Archivio rurale. Un muro di terra at Capnapoliest (Naples, 2025). She is the recipient of the Premio Generazione at Art Days Napoli–Campania (2023) and completed a three-month residency at Artist in Residence Munich (2025).
Giulia Monroy (Palermo, 1990) graduates in Exhibition Space Design and Museum Setups from the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo. She works in production within the field of visual arts. From 2017 to 2023, she was a gallery assistant at Francesco Pantaleone, and from 2021 to 2024, she served as a curatorial and management assistant for ZACentrale, Fondazione Merz. She collaborates with ruber.contemporanea and Fondazione Ghenie Chapels.
In 2024, she founded studio moy, a project offering guided tours of artists' studios in Palermo.
For Una Boccata d'Arte in Sicily, she curated the projects of Ella Littwitz in Pollina (2023), Nicola Baratto & Yiannis Mouravas's project in Sant’Angelo Muxaro (2024) and Nicola Martini in Custonaci (2025).
Ficarra is located among the Nebrodi Mountains, at 450 meters above sea level and just a few kilometers from the Tyrrhenian coast. The historic center, with its stone streets, ancient balconies, and noble palaces, preserves a collective memory shaped by artisanal work and shared traditions. The village skyline is marked by three main sites: the ruins of the Convent of the Observant Friars Minor, known as the Convent of the Hundred Arches; the Mother Church, of Norman origins, which dominates one of the hills of the historic center; and the Prison Fortress, with its past as a medieval castle and noble residence. The town’s cultural vitality is reflected in the Museo Diffuso, the widespread museum that connects thematic collections and places of memory, including the Silk Room and the museum dedicated to the poet Lucio Piccolo di Calanovella. Ficarra also served as inspiration for some significant passages in The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.