SPONDE: Four Projects for Agrigento 2025

Four Projects

1. LANDING: Evoking the Arrival of the Allies in 1943 on the Beach of Licata (July 2025)

   An evening of presentations, readings, songs and tastings created by Teresa Fiore with the screening of a short documentary produced by Awen Films (with complementary activities: interviews with direct witnesses and a workshop)

   The beach of Licata (province of Agrigento) – the first city liberated from Nazi-fascism in Europe – as a witness to a historical event of great relevance – the true beginning of the end of the Second World War – yet often little known, understood, or discussed. The multi-media approach of the event, intertwining literature, gastronomy, music, acting, academic interventions, and testimonies, proposed overcoming disciplinary boundaries to explore the theme, making it of interest to experts and accessible to the public who participated in large numbers. When debating a controversial topic such as the landing from a military and political point of view – Liberation or invasion? End of the regime or start of an occupation? Armistice or unconditional surrender? – the evening brought attention to the impact of the event on the lives of the local people, also investigating the psycho-emotional, nutritional and creative dimension. And it highlighted the other great paradox, that of the American “enemy” who arrived in the guise of a young soldier of Italian origin, sons or grandsons of an relative emigrated to the US. Because that shore of the Landing is also a metaphor for the shore of Sicilian emigration, an old and still highly contemporary phenomenon.

2. The Eco-cultures of the Scala dei Turchi: A Digital Mapping Site (July and December 2025)

   An open access project on ArcGIS co-conceived and co-created by Teresa Fiore and Vetri Nathan

   The shore that connects the crystalline sea of ​​Realmonte (province of Agrigento) and that astonishing white marly formation called Scala dei Turchi represents a container of notions, experiences, phenomena that often remain invisible and which this project has brought out and collected. The shore is here an articulated eco-cultural system where different forms and experiences of life coexist – animals, plants, humans, technologies, geologies – transforming challenges into experiments in liveability, in a “co-becoming”, as formulated by Donna Haraway. The thick mapping site created for AG25 offers alternative visit routes in the wider area of ​​the iconic Scala dei Turchi. Through a multispecies and multidisciplinary reading of the place, attentive to botany, marine biology, geology, gastronomy, cinema and literature, the site invites you to enter a world of human and non-human stories, much more complex than the well-known seaside resort, and to also protect this place – spectacular and fragile at once – with care and wisdom.

3. Right of Blood — Wrong of Blood: An Exhibition on the Law of Citizenship (October-November 2025)

   Prints, drawings and a video by Marina Sagona (curated by Teresa Fiore)

   Any law on citizenship defines the boundary between who belongs and who is excluded: Italian law, based on blood, in its both national and diasporic dimension, produces strong internal contradictions by privileging those who departed from the Italian shore over those who arrive at that very shore. The Right of Blood, or Ius Sanguinis, is in fact the law according to which anyone with a little Italian blood in their veins can become a citizen of our country. Even if you don’t speak the language, if you don’t know the culture, if you have never been to Italy. The Wrong of Blood is the exact opposite: it is the work that those who don’t have that blood must do to become Italian, even if they speak the language, if they know the laws of our country, if they have lived there since they were born. This video project tells stories of migration of foreigners towards Italy and of Italian descendants abroad in search of Italian citizenship, while in the background it illustrates with 14 prints the acquisition of citizenship through naturalization linked to work, by an Italian abroad, the artist Marina Sagona herself.

4. The Other: A Familiar Story – Video installation on emigration and violence against women (December 2025)

   Two-channel video by Maria D. Rapicavoli (curated by Teresa Fiore)

   The shore that constitutes a clear line of separation between two lives is the heart of Maria D. Rapicavoli’s project. The shore in this case represents the starting point of the migratory flow, here expressed in terms of fracture, definitive separation, and then subjugation. Through an experimental narrative, the film recounts the journey to the United States of the protagonist, a Sicilian woman forced to emigrate to the USA with an imposed arranged marriage, leaving her children behind. As such, the woman becomes “other” both with respect to the world from which she comes and that of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which she finds herself living after the crossing of the ocean. The theme of the video is highly relevant to the Agrigento 2025 mission, entitled “The self, the other and nature: Cultural relations and transformations” and places emphasis on the gender issue, in a province characterized by strong emigration, including female emigration, both in the past and today.

    

Synergies

The projects are the result of the co-sponsorship of Agrigento Capital of Culture (Agrigento 2025 Foundation, Italian Ministry of Culture, Sicilian Region) and US university funds (Montclair State University and partly UCLA, University of California Los Angeles). During the implementation, in addition to defining institutional collaborations in the capital and in the province with the Municipalities of Agrigento, Licata and Realmonte, the projects then opened up to synergies with organizations (Liberation Route Europe, Italy), associations (Caritas Diocesana di Agrigento), centers (Farm), institutions (PTUA/Polo Territoriale Universitario di Agrigento, Parco della Valle dei Templi), associations (Local Impact), commercial activities with a philanthropic spirit (La Madia, Bonaiuto) and solidarity (Scaro Cafè) and have guaranteed the involvement of researchers, artists, individuals from the immigrant communities (Gambia, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia), students and teachers of local schools, as well as support for service providers (technology, catering, hospitality, communication, graphics, craftsmanship) in a system that is cultural, social and economic at the same time.

Team

Teresa Fiore – Coordinator of SPONDE, project designer (LANDING and ECO-CULTURES OF THE SCALA DEI TURCHI) and curator (RIGHT OF BLOOD – WRONG OF BLOOD and THE OTHER: A FAMILIAR STORY)

 

Teresa Fiore is a scholar shuttling between Italy and the United States: she intertwines academic research and cultural commitments within a transnational vision. A professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, she has also taught at Harvard, Yale and NYU. Her studies on migration from/to Italy and the post/colonial experience have received recognition from institutions such as Fulbright, Rockefeller and NEH. Author of the book Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies (Fordham 2017/Mondadori, 2021), she has published in multiple languages ​​in magazines, catalogs and edited volumes, helping to redefine the boundaries of migrant thought.

Since 2000 she has been involved in multi-disciplinary cultural programming (for initiatives at Montclair State University, see: montclair.edu/inserra-chair). In 2019 she was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy for her work in cultural diplomacy between Italy and the United States.

Marina Sagona – artist (RIGHT OF BLOOD – WRONG OF BLOOD)

 

Marina Sagona (Rome, 1967) is an Italian-American multimedia artist. After her studies in Rome, she was an assistant to artist Mario Schifano. In 1995, she moved to New York, where she began working as a illustrator for The New York Times and The New Yorker; directed the contemporary art department at FIAC (Foundation for Italian Art and Culture); and co-curated the exhibition Dante Ferretti: Design and Construction for the Cinema at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in 2014.

She was an artist in residence in Galatina (Domus, 2019) and Barcelona (Chiquita Room Gallery, 2021). Sagona’s work is expressed through diverse media such as video, sculpture, and installation, and her artistic journey focuses on the dynamics of communication, shared identity, and the collective unconscious (see her audiovisual works: the pluri-awarded Stabat Mater (Cadence Video Poetry Festival Award, il Best Script/Concept Award al Ribalta Experimental Film Festival e il Best Experimental Film Award al Sipontum Arthouse International Film Festival); Self-Portrait; and Your Dream Is My Dream). Official site.

Maria Rapicavoli – artist (THE OTHER: A FAMILIAR STORY)

Maria D. Rapicavoli was born in Catania and lives and works in New York. She obtained a Master’s degree in Art from Goldsmiths University in London (2005) and a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania (2001). She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012. In 2024 she was an Artist Fellow at the Swiss Institute of Rome. In 2023/24 she taught as an artist at the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York.

She has exhibited in several group exhibitions (The High Line, New York; ICAMilano; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Magazzino Arte Italiana, Cold Spring, NY; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York; Villa Croce Museum, Genoa; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; Villa Croce Museum, Genoa; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Riso, Museum of Contemporary Art, Palermo; Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, Florence; Italian Cultural Institute in London and New York). She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Italian Council Award VI edition (2019); New York Award – The Italian Institute and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, New York (2021). For years she has been an associate artist at the prestigious Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York. For more information, see Maria Rapicavoli‘s complete profile. 

Awen Films (Valerio Ciriaci, Mila Tenaglia, Isaak Liptzin) – Film Production Company (LANDING)

Awen Films is a film production company based in New York specializing in the creation of documentaries and visual projects that explore themes of social and cultural history, with particular attention to the interconnections between Italy and the United States. Their feature films – If Only I Were That Warrior (2015), Mister Wonderland (2019) and Stonebreakers (2022) – have received awards including the Golden Globe, the audience award at the Festival dei Popoli and the award for best documentary at the History Film Festival.

Awen Films’ works have been presented at numerous festivals, academic institutions and cultural spaces, and broadcast on international television networks. In collaboration with the Primo Levi Center, Awen Films created the video installations The Rome Lab (2017) and Los Corassones Avlan (2019). Awen Films’ contribution to the SPONDE project is curated by Valerio Ciriaci, Isaak Liptzin and Mila Tenaglia. Official site.

Vetri Nathan – docente e ricercatore universitario (ECO-CULTURE DELLA SCALA DEI TURCHI)

Vetri Nathan is an Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages ​​and Transcultural Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the founder and principal investigator of a new humanities lab (The Multispecies Futures Lab) – conceived as an interdisciplinary space to study multispecies well-being, connections between cultural and natural identities, and links between human conflict, climate change and environmental damage. Born in Mumbai, Vetri Nathan was the Indian representative at the prestigious UWC Adriatic international high school in Duino, Trieste. Subsequently, he received his PhD from Stanford University in California. Author of the book Marvelous Bodies: Italy’s New Migrant Cinema (2017), he has also published numerous articles on global diasporic identities, postcolonial theory, environmental humanities. Official profile

Legacy and Future Steps

Thanks to these synergies, new opportunities have taken shape for the four projects whose legacy can already be identified in: an in-progress documentary about the Allied Landing in Sicily, provisionally titled “Memories of the Landing”; presentations of the ArcGIS platform “Ecocultures of the Scala dei Turchi” (webinar in English in April 2026); the screening of the video Diritto di sangue – Rovescio di sangue by Marina Sagona a the Museo Riso di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Palermo and at the MAAM Museo delle Periferie di Roma in May 2026; presentation of the video by Maria Rapicavoli L’Altro/a: Una storia familiare at the AAIS Conference (American Association of Italian Studies) in Sardinia in June 2026; and newspaper articles and radio interviews (see the bottom of the webpages of the single events). And the conversation about the design of structured visit routes of WWII military archeology in Sicily with LRE (Liberation Route Europe), as well as the multi-disciplinary visits of the Scala dei Turchi, continues, while art criticism essays are being developed for future publications.