Ama Castle opens "Galaxia," site-specific work on summer solstice day

On June 21, 2025, on the day of the summer solstice, Castello di Ama in the village of Ama (Siena) opens its doors for the inauguration of Galaxia, a new site-specific installation by Mexican artist Bosco Sodi (Mexico City, 1970). The work becomes part of the Castello di Ama Collection, a project launched in 1999 that consists of a series of permanent interventions distributed in the spaces of the village, between architecture, landscape and memory. The Castello di Ama Collection was created on the initiative of Lorenza Sebasti and Marco Pallanti, with the inaugural intervention by MichelangeloPistoletto. Almost every year since then, the hamlet of Ama has welcomed some of the most significant voices on the international art scene. These include Daniel Buren, Giulio Paolini, Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lee Ufan, Roni Horn, Jenny Holzer and Giorgio Andreotta Calò. Each artist was invited to engage with the place, letting the territory itself suggest a possible interpretation, in a process in which nature, history and local culture are transformed into active elements of the work.

The Collection’s curatorial approach is based on the valorization of terroir, a term borrowed from enology, which defines a set of environmental, cultural and production factors that contribute to a wine’s identity. Likewise, the works that make up the Collection are conceived as outcomes of a direct relationship with Ama, in an interweaving in which space is never neutral. Indeed, the context operates as a maieutic force, capable of decisively influencing the conception and form of the work. Within this framework is Galaxia, Bosco Sodi’s intervention placed in the ancient cellar of Villa Pianigiani, one of the three historic residences within the village. It is a hypogeic space that preserves the traces of a slowed down time, marked by the cycle of wine aging. The nature of the place contributes to the definition of the atmosphere in which the work is inscribed: the muted air, the rarefied light and the silence of the environment contribute to a perception that recalls elements of sacredness and transformation.

The installation consists of six clay spheres, each about eighty centimeters in diameter. The surfaces, marked by cracks and burns, show the outcomes of a process of alteration that is only partially controlled. At the center of the composition, a seventh sphere, glazed in gold, introduces a chromatic and symbolic variation that seems to suggest an axis or pole around which the other forms rotate. The spatial organization of the work recalls a planetary arrangement, an astral reference also emphasized by the title Galaxia. The cosmic reference is intended to introduce a suggestion, by contrast with the underground location of the work. Bosco Sodi’s artistic practice is characterized by the use of organic materials and a focus on time as an active element of the creative process. The making of the spheres follows a principle of waiting. The clay, once shaped into its spherical form, is left to dry without intervention, allowing environmental conditions and the intrinsic characteristics of the material to determine the final outcome. In the course of drying, the surface changes, cracks, and may shatter. The artist partly relinquishes control, entrusting the material and time with the formal definition of the work.

In this perspective, time is conceived as an agent that acts on matter, transforms and reveals it. Waiting thus becomes a constitutive act, a dynamic process through which the work is determined and takes shape. The resulting imperfections are accepted as constitutive elements. This is a vision that finds references in the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which values irregularity, impermanence and simplicity as sources of authentic beauty. Sodi’s intervention is thus rooted in the specificity of the place, both spatially and conceptually. By placing itself within a historical and productive context, the work activates a dialogue with the memory of the site and the tradition of the Collection. The work confronts transformation and waiting, elements also central to the wine cycle, symbolically interweaving natural, cultural and artistic processes. The golden sphere at the center of the composition could then evoke an other dimension, a tension toward elsewhere that coexists with the physicality and fragility of matter. On the summer solstice, a symbolic moment of passage and renewal, the opening of Galaxia confirms the identity of Castello di Ama as a place of experimentation and listening. A place where time, waiting and matter find their own form, always provisional, always becoming.

Ama Castle opens "Galaxia," site-specific work on summer solstice day

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