Palazzo Abatellis played host to VB94, a performance by Vanessa Beecroft: hieratic movement between statues and models dressed in white created in her Los Angeles studio
Matteo Messina Denaro – Black Palermo
The boss of the bosses, Matteo Messina Denaro, is captured in a clinic in Palermo, just a few meters from the house where his family lives. Behind him he has thirty years on the run and a history of Gothic novel atrocities. The last absolute sovereign of the Sicilian Mafia – who knows if that is so. Surely there will be a successor. President Mattarella, a Sicilian, is wary and urges us not to let our guard down.
Suffering from cancer, Matteo Messina Denaro has enjoyed the conspiratorial protection of a network of connivance hatched by what the Italian television refers to as, the mafia bourgeoisie. The plot includes an exchange of generalities, thanks and a provincial surveyor, Andrea Bonafede, who surrendered his documents and tax code to a mafioso, but who protests that he is unaware of the Mafia chief’s real identity.
A plot twist that is only the most recent episode in the saga of black Palermo, an entity based on a system of arcana, an impenetrable wall fed by power, political and financial hinterlands commanded by murky hierarchies. A different world, underground and paradoxically emerged, that mixes Luigi Natoli’s I Beati Paoli with unrivaled cruelty, business deals and complicity, as ostentatious as unsuspected.
Vanessa Beecroft – White Palermo
The white, radiant and cathartic side of the ancient Panormos is that which Vanessa Beecroft brought out with her Performance of VB94 last December 8th (Feast of the Immaculate Conception) at the Church of San Francesco, near Palazzo Abatellis, the Sicilian Regional Gallery on Via Alloro, the main thoroughfare of the Kalsa district. Hundreds of people waited on the street to enter the museum in small groups, a tightly packed mass of Aspra stone that stands like a fortress and for centuries was a women’s convent.
A Catalan Gothic style building constructed as a symbol of status for Francesco Abatellis, port master of the Kingdom of Sicily, Grand Seneschal and Praetor of Palermo in the service of Ferdinand II of Aragon, and designed in 1495 by Matteo Carnilivari who, at that time, was engaged in the construction of the nearby Palazzo Ajutamicristo. Francesco Abatellis, or Patella, married twice, but remained without heirs bequeathing his residence to a religious order. Damaged by the bombings in 1943, after some restorative work the palace was reinvented with an exhibition intervention and restoration by Carlo Scarpa from 1953-54.
VB94: Eleanor of Aragon sculpted by Francesco Laurana
VB94 started from a meditation surrounding the marble bust of Eleanor of Aragon sculpted by Francesco Laurana in 1468 and the plastic works of the Gaginis – in particular Antonello Gagini – a family of masters in sculpture, statuary and architecture of Ticino origin, who, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, spread the Renaissance language in Sicily.
The white is marble, rendered almost transparent by autochthonous light, a vivid and hazy emanation even within these walls, covered by Scarpa in grass green or Gauloises blue stucco. The bust depicting Eleanor of Aragon, which combines geometry with mystique, has become something of an obsession for Beecroft in recent years. Large clay works shaped by the artist in her Los Angeles studio after visiting Palazzo Abatellis in 1987, and then reproduced in ceramic, bronze and wax, appearing as totems resting on the floor or high up on wooden plinths, populated the ground-floor room where the performance took place.
Oval and stereometric silhouettes, humanistic and Martian. Eyes and ogival faces interspersed the iron columns holding capitals, reliefs and sculptures. Other heads, caressed by slight gilding, evoked the poetics of the Gaginis, most notably Portrait of a Boy sculpted by Antonello. Gilding as if golden rivulets on a snow-white surface, on Kabuki white lead.
Byzantium and Norman-era mosaics: Vanessa Beecroft’s craft
Abstraction that seeks continuity with classical heritage through Byzantium and Norman-era mosaics, negates the horror vacui of the Baroque feast, opposing the hyperchromatic decoration of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churches and palaces. On the half-open lips of Vanessa Beecroft’s sculptures, the smile of Antonello da Messina’s Annunciation is revealed, a Marian pictorial icon that Carlo Scarpa wanted mount on the muse- um’s second floor inside a reliquary structure with wooden cusps.
The gem of the Gallery, an enigma that encapsulates the temperament of an entire land. A mandala of stupefaction that defies all chronology. Indecipherable eyes of pride, bewilderment and awe. Wonder and dismay in the suspended gesture of a hand. The anticipation of a messiah, a bearer of a likely impossible redemption, an angel before us, whom we cannot know. Or perhaps the angel, who mirrors our profanity within the mystery of this hypnotic canvas, is us.
Church of San Francesco, near Palazzo Abatellis, the Sicilian Regional Gallery on Via Alloro
The Gallery, closed to the public during the performance, a catharsis proposed by going upwards, leaving behind the late Gothic fresco of The Triumph of Death from Palazzo Sclafani, of controversial attribution and known to be the matrix of Picasso’s Guernica.
Mehr Licht: a liberating itinerary that ascends to the crenelated terrace lying atop the tower, bathed in sun and wind, and scented by the saline reverberation of the sea not far away. Just beyond the courtyard is a glimpse of gutted rooms that face the riddled walls in ruins. Festoons of shrubs and verdure that show the daily occupations of those who have taken possession. Something that now seems strange, given that Via Alloro is all a fervor of restoration and reconstruction – not always philological but able to succeed nevertheless – and has lost that melancholic charm of memento mori and abandonment belonging to it since the Allied bombing of 1943.
An event evoked several times, with a thread of sorrow, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard, the apocalypse of old Palermo and his own ancestral home. From that rubble would materialize the building havoc protracted over decades and the sack of Palermo that distorted and demeaned its centuries-old facies. The ninety-fourth performance, created in collaboration with the Friends of the Museums of Sicily and the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples and Milan and produced by Vito Planeta Jr., followed socio-political research on the theme of women and feminism, which has characterized her artistic journey since 1993.
Vanessa Beecroft: North African migrants and members of the local aristocracy
Beecroft entered an intimate dimension in this place, which was a nunnery for 400 years. Attending Beecroft’s VB94 liturgy, gave the measure of a suspended and sacred complexity. Women of all ages wore snow-white dresses and tunics derived from old linen or embroidered silk sheets – costumes from the Palermo’s Casa Preti atelier – and gilded in gold. Impassive, standing and seated. Distant and absorbed gazes. Among the twenty-one participants called to create the heterogeneous group, were North African migrants and members of the local aristocracy, such as Raimonda Lanza di Trabia, whose father, Don Raimondo, inspired Modugno’s L’uomo in frac, (literally the man in the tailcoat), and her daughter Ottavia Casagrande. Re-weaving oneiric and literary ties with the city at the center of the Mediterranean, evoking religious overtones and fragments of metempsychosis from the tapestry of a boundless narrative.
Gustave Rudman Rambali, a French-Swedish composer
In front of them all lay Maddalena, the only one not standing of seated, covered with long frizzy hair and a rough skin of a hermit’s kid, according to the iconography handed down from the Byzantine and Gothic painters to the Renaissance sculptures of Donatello and Desiderio da Settignano, and into the late eighteenth century by Antonio Canova.
A rugged, dark, androgynous and penitential figure in contrast to the niveous and ideally distant glow of the female ecclesia behind. Vanessa Beecroft led the rhythm, unraveling the meaning with her movements. She composed her own texture, dancing in concentric circles and slight trajectories, camera in hand. Silent camera technicians following her as she recorded images and details or assembled and disassembled lamps and carts. Time was marked by the metronome of music composed by Gustave Rudman Rambali, a French-Swedish composer.
The Feast of the Immaculate Conception: Church of San Francesco d’Assisi
In the same day of the performance, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception was held at the nearby Church of San Francesco d’Assisi. It was instituted on the occasion of the plague of 1624. The neoclassical silver and gold simulacrum of the crowned Virgin is hoisted on the reliquary float carried in procession on the shoulders of the confraternity ‘of the Port and Carriage’ to the Piazza San Domenico.
The portal opens at the nave, which looks like the mouth of the Gothic church. With the scinnuta, the procession glides in small steps along a walkable path of planks. A dealer shouts precise orders, exhortations, invocations and unintelligible prayers, as the crowd erupts, and flowers and confetti fall like rain in front of the Palazzo Cattolica. Illuminations, incongruous fireworks disturb the afternoon sky, while a wind band attacks vaguely oriental melodies and Bellinian and Verdian souvenirs. Brotherhoods, purple banners and processional crosses, volutes of incense, and blessings of lustral water. Worshippers that raise children, prelates in purple mozzetta, lace and big black glasses. Cascading hugs, mute arcane messages and sly winks.
Rococo grace, no longer with Baroque emphasis
Along the central nave of the basilica stripped naked, and within Giacomo Serpotta’s Franciscan Virtues of 1723, dance a sinuous court pantomime of Rococo grace, no longer with Baroque emphasis. They whisper among themselves, perhaps intoning an aria by Hasse, Rossi or Händel. They do not grant onlookers anything but sideways glances, as self-absorbed and supple as Egyptian rushes or evanescent Catholic Bajaderes from eighteenth-century opera. Roberto Longhi was seduced by them.
White, light and dazzling with shiny stucco sprinkled with marble dust. On the faces of the Virtues, the questioning and hermetic smile of the female figures of the Gaginis and Francesco Laurana, sculptors with several works present at the Church of San Francesco, that are centuries old. Nearby, in a narrow alley, hides the Oratory of San Lorenzo, set within a continuous array of snow-white stuccoes illuminated with gold leaf. A saraband of allegories, eight puppet theaters and frolicking cherubs conceived by Giacomo Serpotta between 1700 and 1705.
The Church of San Lorenzo, Serpotta – Vanessa Beecroft
At the Church of San Lorenzo, Serpotta is confirmed as the emanation of the Gaginis and humanist Laurana in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a continuation of their magisterium. Benches of ebony adorned with mother- of-pearl and ivory inlays enclose the perimeter, the floor a carpet of polychrome marble with the grate of martyrdom in the center. Victorious women, imbued with a haughty grace, with power. Or so recalls Cavalier Fabrizio Clerici, a nobleman and painter on the run from Milan and a lost love, in Vincenzo Consolo’s Retablo, coalescing the dynamic malice conceived by Serpotta at San Lorenzo.
The Gelfo sisters: Practice 799
There was no alarm, only two elderly women, the Gelfo sisters, stood guard over the treasure. Caravaggio’s Nativity, a painting that dates to the year 1600, is among the world’s ten most sought-after stolen masterpieces. The subject, since the distant 1960s of fanciful conjecture, a thousand inferences, suppositions and mysteries. A source of inspiration for Leonardo Sciascia, Roberto Andò and Ruggero Cappuccio, among others, it was replaced in 2015 by a perfect replica, the result of sophisticated production systems and technologies.
Practice 799, compiled by the Cultural Heritage Protection Command, gathers a plethora of statements and testimonies concerning the theft of the work, most of which are today considered unlikely or untrue. A novel within a novel that involves a crowd of peons and the Gotha of Cosa Nostra, from the Brancaccio clan to Riina, from Gerlando Alberti to Tano Badalamenti, the mozzarella Francesco Marino Mannoia and repentant such as Salvatore Cangemi and Gaetano Grado.
The Church of San Lorenzo on Christmas night, December 24, 2022, Vanessa Beecroft
At the Church of San Lorenzo on Christmas night, December 24, 2022, Vanessa Beecroft presented a work accompanied by an audio composed by her son, Dean Durkin, which will remain on display in the anti-oratory until October 17, 2023, the anniversary of the theft.
«With my Nativity, expecting the iconography of Caravaggio, I wanted to exalt the light of the Divine, overshadowing the human. The city gave me a warm welcome and a deep understanding of my work». The lacerating absence of the Caravaggio-esque Nativity thus generates a new creative gesture, something rooted in the past but projected into the contingency of the present. Art as a redemptive tool, the illumination of palingenesis, even in the darkest moments.
The Oratories of Saint Lorenzo and Mercurio, the Churches of Santa Maria alla Catena, and Santa Maria del Piliere
In collaboration with the Curia, the nonprofit association he presides over manages a number of monuments, including the Oratories of Saint Lorenzo and Mercurio, the Churches of Santa Maria alla Catena, and the one of Santa Maria del Piliere, in the region, in particular the province of Palermo, ensuring their protection and maintenance, enhancement and visitation.
In 2010, Tortorici launched the Next Exhibition, now in its thirteenth edition, with the work of Vanessa Beecroft and the intention of exercising, through artistic creation, a still open wound that awaits possible healing. A project that saw a succession of several artists, including Emilio Isgrò who imagined the Nativity as a texture of spectra and gaps, matter in dissolution or, vice versa, in an aggregative process. Pictorial ghosts that perhaps project portents of rebirth and regeneration.
«We are now in the thirteenth year of this initiative», says Bernardo Tortorici, who lives in a historic family home near Piazza Bologni, «reaffirming the presence of the Nativity within the Oratory, through the intervention of contemporary art and the creation of a new work, takes on the value of an archaic ritual of auspiciousness, with the hope that it may be a propitiatory action to the discovery of the missing masterpiece. I thank Vanessa Beecroft who has taken on such a challenge of having to confront Caravaggio and his absence».
Dual, ambiguous, fascinating Palermo
Black and white, immanence and jarring absence, pacification and restlessness. A summation of opposites. The night of December 8th ends with dancing in the husk of a Piranesian ruin, a baroque courtyard bristling with the columns of an abandoned patrician residence on Via Maqueda.
It was entered by knocking on a portal and passing through a curtain of white embroidered sheets hanging screen after screen in a floating labyrinth. White, still white in the nocturnal darkness and melodrama of this indolent and hysterical city, sublime, firm and courteous, enveloping and poisoned. But on the mend, judging by the atmosphere of redemption and recovery that one breathes in the old town and by the many foreigners, mostly young, who have chosen it as a platform for their lives and work. A secret party following the dinner given chez soi by the Duchess of Palma, Nicoletta Lanza Tomasi, a repository of humor and culture, the wife of Joachim, the adopted son of a writer. Nineteenth-century optical parquet flooring, polished to mania by candlelight.
The Beata Corbera and models of the Chariot of Santa Rosalia’s feast
The Beata Corbera, the familiar saint in hallucinated ecstasy, and models of the Chariot of Santa Rosalia’s feast sit along the pale marble staircase. Timbale, sartù and conventual triumphs of gluttony. The robust wine of Planeta flows in goblets, Empire chandeliers in corbeille and fragile Venetian glass flowers. Everything changes so that nothing has to change in this insular and Proustian circularity.
All around, thousands of books in overlapping rows, overflowing from rigorous, almost scholastic shelves, belonging to the man himself, Don Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma, the author of The Leopard, who settled here with his Latvian wife, psychoanalyst Alexandra Wolff-Stomersee, after the destruction of the family residence during World War II until his untimely death. Don Giuseppe, the erudite alchemist master of an intellectual generation that distilled an indelible collective memory on Palermo. A literary spell that is beauty, stasis and curse, delirium and reality, a mixture of bitterness, hope and prophecy.
In memory of Vito Planeta
