The matter could not be existed (Pietro Consagra 1986) It's a majestic sculpture composed of two elements, leaning and parallels, colored of white and black, in a delicate harmony of empty and full. The sculpture, high 18m. has been realized in reinforced concrete, in chromatic contrasting. More than the others, this sculpture testifies the relationship man-environment through the rationality of its conception and the lightness with which the cement becomes bi-dimensional and practicable. The sculpture invites the visitor to pass through it, like cross a door that take in an other time, in an archaic past. Then, we realize of the immensity of the sky, under which the history slides since a remote time. A refuge or a barrier placed among the imaginary reality. The matter may not have been by Pietro ConsagraFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
Antonio Presti, young entrepreneur and expert of contemporary art, wanted remember and give tribute of his dead father with a monument, a colossal cross to be placed on a river bed near the construction company Inherited from his father. He used to talk about this idea during his frequent trips to Rome, in occasion of walks around the city visiting galleries of art with along with numerous art dealers. Antonio Presti met Roberta Du Chene, that in that period was very close friend of the sculptor Pietro Consagra. He spoke with both about the cross, but in the end an intuition, like a light and thin lightning that crept voluptuously into his veins and inserted on his mind, became an explosion of passion and enthusiasm. The author of this intuition was Consagra, he inspired Antonio the idea of replacing the cross with something more evocative to be installed in the torrent called Fiumara di Tusa.
The matter could not be existed (Pietro Consagra 1986) It's a majestic sculpture composed of two elements, leaning and parallels, colored of white and black, in a delicate harmony of empty and full. The sculpture, high 18m. has been realized in reinforced concrete, in chromatic contrasting. More than the others, this sculpture testifies the relationship man-environment through the rationality of its conception and the lightness with which the cement becomes bi-dimensional and practicable. The sculpture invites the visitor to pass through it, like cross a door that take in an other time, in an archaic past. Then, we realize of the immensity of the sky, under which the history slides since a remote time. A refuge or a barrier placed among the imaginary reality. The matter may not have been by Pietro ConsagraFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
After two years, the monumental sculpture by Pietro Consagra, The matter could not be existed was made. The sculpture was considered by international critics the most beautiful open-air work by Pietro Consagra, an experience that had given Antonio Presti the first great emotion of what would be, in the following years, a luminous and endless path called open-air museum Fiumara d’Arte.
Monument for a dead poet (Window on the sea) – (Tano Festa 1989) For the visual impact, the sculpture is known as the "Window on the sea". Made by Tano Festa and dedicated to the brother poet, the sculpture is a hymn to the color and infancy, recurrent topics in the works of the artist. The frame, high 18 meters, realized in reinforced concrete and ferrous armor, is the triumph of the blue color, that is not the one we usually see on the painter’s palette, but the blue of the soul, when a poet and sculptor like Tano Festa, that was adult and child at the same time, decides to show himself on the infinite. This enormous window that frames the sea, expresses the limited sense of the possibility to be stopped with the thought on the horizon. But it’s also a tension to the serenity searched from the artist, broken from the black monolith, finite sense of our existence, that runs through the joyful window adorned with the typical little clouds recurrent in the artist artworks, interfering with the harmony of the sculpture. Monument for a dead poet (Window on the sea) by Tano FestaFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
Meanwhile Antonio Presti began relationships with other artists. With them he debated, he plotted, he launched, he planned. He asked them sketches, models, involving them in his artistic fury, in his dream, to build giant sculptures spread in the Fiumara. An arduous journey because the lands on which the works were being built were state-owned. During the creation of the sculptures, orders came to suspend and demolish the works of art with the charged of illegal constructions.
A curve thrown behind of timeFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
7 court sentences with order of fines and prisons. All this seemed to stimulate new ideas in Antonio's mind, such as the sculpture competition, to which, in the first edition, replied hundreds of artists. The jury was composed of directors of great Italian and European museums: Manfred Fath from Mannheim museum, Héléne Vassalle from the direction of French museums, Giovanni Joppolo, director of the Opus intenational art magazine in Paris, Lucia Matino of PAC - Contemporary Art Pavilion - Milan, the art critic Lucio Barbera from Messina, the architect Patrizia Merlino, and also two well-known Catalan architects, Oriol Bohigas and Elisabeth Galí, great supporters of art in Barcelona, the fantastic city of Gaudí and of contemporary art. All the sketches were later exhibited in the Galleria Giulia (Rome), which showed curiosity and interest among a large audience and numerous art critics.
Mediterranean energy (Antonio Di Palma 1989) A blue wave that ideally binds the mountain to the sea, a spurt of energy in the wild nature. The sculpture, realized in little essential lines and inserted in the nature contemplating it, is a blue mantle that goes up and then sweetly comes down. In its essentiality the work seems a vibrating movement for a jump of cosmic light. The monumental sense of the sculpture is not verticality, but its horizontal and soft contact relationship with the nature. A huge blue wave in cement, swollen with the wind; a solid sign of water on the mountain, like the sea we perceive in the horizon, very distant, and its physical materialization on the hill stops every question during the astonishment. Mediterranean Energy by Antonio Di PalmaFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
Among the many artists, were chosen Antonio Di Palma (Florence) and Italo Lanfredini (Mantova) sketches. The construction for Mediterranean Energy by Antonio Di Palma and Arianna’s Labyrint began immediately, the first on a tableland in the village of Motta d’Affermo, the second on a panoramic hill in Castel di Lucio area.
A curve thrown behind of timeFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
Meanwhile Antonio Presti had already contacted another sculptor, Paolo Schiavocampo, to whom commissioned a sculpture to be placed at the crossroads between the road leading to Castel di Lucio and an old country road. Antonio Presti was always looking of the site intended to host the monumental sculptures. Some were inaccessible sites, such as the one chosen for the work of Hidetoshi Nagasawa. At the first meeting in Tusa, Antonio and Hidetoshi looked at each other, studied each other, and certainty both shared the idea.
The golden boat room (Hidetoshi Nagasawa 1989) In the riverbed of Romei river, dug in an hill that delimits it, is "La stanza di barca d’oro” (The gold boat room), an art creation of extraordinary suggestion and beauty, realized by a Japanese artist, Hidetoshi Nagasawa: an hypogeal room starting from an underground corridor of 35 meters, covered with metallic slabs, in which shows up the shape of an upturned boat covered of gold sheets, joined on the ground by a main mast in rose marble. From the material silence, even though animated from thousand of thin voices of the surrounding nature, starts the large spiritual silence of the room, where the boat is hanging in the center. The conceptual art work is been born for to be closed for 100 years, sealing it with a door in order that could let it start living "through the mental energy of the memory only". The golden boat room by Hidetoshi NagasawaFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
The result was The golden boat room. This work of art might seem crazy, but if we just pause for a moment to think about it the heart stops for the emotion. The site is particularly romantic, the Romei torrent and a small ancient bridge in a large and dense forest. Over a cliff, which overlooks the torrent, a large cave was dug and carpeted with corten steel. In this dark room the sculpture, the structure of a large boat upside down and made by iron tubes covered with gold leaves and docked to the main mast in red marble going from floor to ceiling, was installed. The iron door welded to hide the room completed the work of art. The beauty donated to the earth, hidden to human eyes.
The golden boat room (Hidetoshi Nagasawa 1989) In the riverbed of Romei river, dug in an hill that delimits it, is "La stanza di barca d’oro” (The gold boat room), an art creation of extraordinary suggestion and beauty, realized by a Japanese artist, Hidetoshi Nagasawa: an hypogeal room starting from an underground corridor of 35 meters, covered with metallic slabs, in which shows up the shape of an upturned boat covered of gold sheets, joined on the ground by a main mast in rose marble. From the material silence, even though animated from thousand of thin voices of the surrounding nature, starts the large spiritual silence of the room, where the boat is hanging in the center. The conceptual art work is been born for to be closed for 100 years, sealing it with a door in order that could let it start living "through the mental energy of the memory only". The golden boat room by Hidetoshi NagasawaFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
During the day of the closing of the room, there was a queue of thousands of people who, in groups and orderly fashion, entered to admire for the last time the shape of the golden boat. Why the boat is upside down? Nagasawa declared: "inside the room everything must be without meaning, no right or left, no high or low. I conceived the room as a floating place, a journey into an independent universe». The emotion was choral, but got cut short by the arrival of the last and unexpected visitor arrived at sunset: a judicial officer with a seizure notification. He attacked his report and prevented the closing of the room, then the completion of the work.
Ariadne’s Labyrinth (Italo Lanfredini 1989) The sculpture, in the shape of an archetype symbol, the maze, is a physical path, inner also, where once we get in is impossible not to cross it all. The art work is connected to the past, to the classic culture, to the birth, to the first education of the life. Through a natural passage, you get into the maze and exit from the maze, such as the man, in the time, has entered and exited from the earth scene. Who gets in the maze, ask heself questions to himself that regard the own existence, in a place and a timeless dimension in which it’s impossible don’t think. The maze stimulates the mind, is spirituality that derives from a kind of "maternity", expressed in a concentric tangle of circles culminating in an aspiration to the sublime. A journey that seems inside the earth but it’s under the sky, where the center is the life, the ancient source represented by an olive tree, metaphor of the Mother Nature and the mystery of the existence. Ariadne's Labyrinth by Italo LanfrediniFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
This and all others complaints for construction abuse, were started from the Superintendency of Cultural and Environmental Heritage of Messina, in a Sicily devastated by illegal constructions: the artworks of the open air museum Fiumara d’Arte were considered abusive building to be demolished. This happened on June 24, 1989.
A curve thrown behind of timeFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
From the birth of the open air museum Fiumara d’Arte, only three years had passed, meantime had been donated to eternity other monumental sculptures: Paolo Schiavocampo's work of art with a suggestive title, A curve thrown behind time (today restored and transformed according to a project of contemporary art restoration of a work of art if the artist is alive)
Monument for a dead poet (Window on the sea) – (Tano Festa 1989) For the visual impact, the sculpture is known as the "Window on the sea". Made by Tano Festa and dedicated to the brother poet, the sculpture is a hymn to the color and infancy, recurrent topics in the works of the artist. The frame, high 18 meters, realized in reinforced concrete and ferrous armor, is the triumph of the blue color, that is not the one we usually see on the painter’s palette, but the blue of the soul, when a poet and sculptor like Tano Festa, that was adult and child at the same time, decides to show himself on the infinite. This enormous window that frames the sea, expresses the limited sense of the possibility to be stopped with the thought on the horizon. But it’s also a tension to the serenity searched from the artist, broken from the black monolith, finite sense of our existence, that runs through the joyful window adorned with the typical little clouds recurrent in the artist artworks, interfering with the harmony of the sculpture. Monument for a dead poet (Window on the sea) by Tano FestaFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
Monument for a dead poet by Tano Festa on the beach of Villa Margi, work of art renamed by the people Window on the sea; Mediterranean energy by Antonio di Palma, an immense sea wave on a hill in the village of Motta d'Affermo; Labyrinth of Ariadne by Italo Lanfredini, a maze one kilometer long located on a lonely promontory overlooking Castel di Lucio village.
ArethusaFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
A little later it was the turn of Arethusa, by Piero Dorazio e Graziano Marini, ceramic decoration in a military barrack (Carabinieri headquarter of Castel di Lucio). The celebrations for the inauguration of these sculptures were spectacular, as well as every event signed by Antonio Presti.
The way of the beauty (AA.VV. 1991) Forty ceramic artist from various places of the world, compared themselves with an old wall situated along the provincial road Castel di Lucio-Mistretta. The memory of that ugly wall of cement has been treated with poetry and love, inserting on the matter, like a transformation element, the “terracotta”. In order to validate this agreement of “devotion to the beauty”, every artist has installed in the wall a ceramic artwork. The wall of the beauty by AA.VV.Fiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
Wandering as always in the provincial roads along Fiumara, Antonio Presti noticed a long retaining wall, empty and sad, that seemed to be there for years waiting for him. In a short time he called his artist, who arrived and pretty soon, the wall was covered with ceramic works of extraordinary beauty. The wall of beauty was inaugurated in 1990 (Mistretta Village).
The golden boat room (Hidetoshi Nagasawa 1989) In the riverbed of Romei river, dug in an hill that delimits it, is "La stanza di barca d’oro” (The gold boat room), an art creation of extraordinary suggestion and beauty, realized by a Japanese artist, Hidetoshi Nagasawa: an hypogeal room starting from an underground corridor of 35 meters, covered with metallic slabs, in which shows up the shape of an upturned boat covered of gold sheets, joined on the ground by a main mast in rose marble. From the material silence, even though animated from thousand of thin voices of the surrounding nature, starts the large spiritual silence of the room, where the boat is hanging in the center. The conceptual art work is been born for to be closed for 100 years, sealing it with a door in order that could let it start living "through the mental energy of the memory only". The golden boat room by Hidetoshi NagasawaFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
After 11 long years and 3 trials, the closing and renunciation of The golden boat room took place, on 16 June 2000. However, the sculptures will not be demolished because Antonio Presti appeals to the sentence. At the final appeal judgment of the Court of Messina the “crime” expired for statute of limitation.
Pyramid - 38° Parallel (Mauro Staccioli 2010) The site chosen for the sculpture of Mauro Staccioli is a light high ground in the territory of Motta d’Affermo: an outpost on the sea , in front of the excavations of the ancient greek city of Halaesa, whose geographic coordinates touch exactly the thirtyeighth parallel. The artist's work translates the abstraction of terrestrial dimension in creative metaphysical perception, and seals the close bond of the work to the geography of the place, in perfect harmony with artistic poetry which has characterized the artist's creations since the sixties.The work, a titanic empty tetrahedron realized in corten steel partially sunk in the rocky ground, shows a long fissure along the western edge. This sign describes exactly its existence in the specificity of the place and in the cosmic space. Like an introvert light, conscious witness of the cyclical and irreversible passage of time, the pyramid capture the solar light through the fissure, recording in its geometric inside the luminous reflections from the zenith to the sunset. From the immortality concept well-known correlated to the pyramid of the Pharaoh, takes the place the concept of transitoriness, through which the artist celebrates the life in its incessant dream to be eternal. Pyramid 38º parallel by Mauro StaccioliFiumara d'arte/ Fondazione Antonio Presti - Energia Mediterranea di Antonio Di Palma
On 21 March 2010, after 19 years of struggles, battles, affirmations, loneliness and resistance, the open air museum Fiumara d’Arte is enriched with a new sculpture, Pyramid – 38° parallel by Mauro Staccioli. Antonio Presti and his Foundation hope to continue the future cultural activities no longer loneliness, but with an active policy that manages and respects the works of art, as a concrete resource for tourism and cultural development of the Haelesa Valley, which is now famous and recognized in the world thanks to the open air museum Fiumara d’Arte.
Text: Gianfranco Molino
Photo: Photographic archive Fondazione Antonio Presti -Fiumara D'Arte
