An excavator at Palermo's Quattro Canti: it's Arcangelo Sassolino's work against the Mafia

Today was the 30th anniversary of the Capaci massacre, while July 19 will mark the 30th anniversary of the Via d’Amelio massacre: to commemorate the two Mafia attacks in which Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino as well as the members of their escorts lost their lives, one of Italy’s greatest artists, Arcangelo Sassolino, presented today at the invitation of the Falcone Foundation his new work, Elisa, a monumental work of great power set up at Piazza Villena at the Quattro Canti in Palermo.

Elisa is a symbolic sculpture in the shape of an excavator, white and headless, moving on itself through slow and seemingly uncontrolled movements. The excavator was in a construction site, completely burned out, blocked due to procurement issues and by the mother machine: Arcangelo Sassolino thus gave new life to the mechanical arm by giving it an artificial heart, through a hydraulic system.

The sculpture looks like a primitive beast that carves through concrete, cracks it and destroys the very pedestal on which it rests. The three arms, disengaged from each other, create different forms in space. Arcangelo Sassolino’s work is meant to evoke the many architectural and urban plunderings that the Mafia has carried out throughout Italy, particularly in Palermo and Sicily.

Thus, in one of the most beautiful and at the same time most fragile historical places in the city of Palermo, the brutality of concrete, albeit temporary, and the dullness of the demolition machine, which eats everything, even its own altar of presumption, burst in with their jarring presence. Elisa is also meant to be an indictment of those who shout against contemporary art in historic places while rewarding the indifferent, as well as an indictment of the moderates who have been silent over the years about the speculative squatting of Cosa Nostra and the Palermo Sack.

The white mechanical arm, reads a note, “like a sepulcher, like a demon of scrap metal, is a passing provocation, like a sudden disconcerting reflection in the mirror of an unexpected window dressing that reveals us as we really are, hypocrites and fragile.”

Arcangelo Sassolino

Archangel

An excavator at Palermo's Quattro Canti: it's Arcangelo Sassolino's work against the Mafia

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