“Mythopoeia” is a journey through the stories, legends, myths, and places that forge the contours of this land: the formative elements of its cultural identity. They are also the prime ingredients of a work that aims to bring together the distant past and lived experience. A work made possible – and perhaps filtered – through the construction of an extra-ordinary iconographic library, on which a group of students ranging in age from 16 to 25 has drawn to fashion a narrative all their own.“I ‘ru frati” (Two Brothers), “A spirduta” (The Lost Lady”), “Paulinu di sette sogghi,” (Paulino Seven Shoals), “Damone and Finzia”, “I ciarauli” (The Healer), “A caassa cu n’occhiu,” (The House with an Eye), and “Salavatore Gurreri” are just some of the facets of a molten material that seems to change shape every time we try to grasp it. Endless variations – the same variations that we find in classical mythology – on a theme that is often hidden, and sometimes lost, in the layered and resonant interlacing of a few simple modules, reconfigured in apparently endless recombinations.
The final product consists in the construction of a participatory narrative that involves the daily production and circulation of audio-visual content with an approach aimed at unhinging the very concept of photography as an instrument for the mere restoration of objective reality and, at the same time, shifts the focus to the time lurking behind the story and the events. A way – one of the few, after all – to keep on nurturing a cultural tradition that continues to be the basic element of a truly common identity.
The project is part of a broader undertaking, financed by Law 77/2006, aimed at rediscovering and promoting the UNESCO sites in Siracusa and Pantalica, supervised, in its visual aspects, by Luca Andreoni, Niccolò Benetton, and Simone Santilli, aka The Cool Couple, with the assistance of Maria Vittoria Trovato. Cosimo Bizzarri, together with Naomi Galavotti, accompanied the students of the Fine Arts Academy of Siracusa and the “Antonello Gagni” High School of the Arts during their journey of rediscovery of the stories.
