For the first time in Sicily, Alfredo Pirri's installation of walkable mirrors

After the Galleria Nazionale, Palazzo Altemps and Caesar’s Forum in Rome, the Certosa di Padula in Salerno, the former Tito Bunker in Bosnia and other prestigious venues in Italy and abroad, Alfredo Pirri ’s (Cosenza, 1957)traveling installation entitled Passi arrives for the first time in Sicily. From May 17 to Dec. 31, 2021, the Sala Hypostila of the Castello Maniace in Syracuse will have a new temporary floor: eight hundred square meters covered with walkable mirrors, where images of cross vaults, luminous stone columns and Norman architecture are multiplied.

This is the largest edition of the work realized so far in an enclosed space, second only to the open-air one designed for Caesar’s Forum. In a fascinating correspondence between the mirror of the sea surrounding the castle and the reflecting plane inside the Hypostyle Hall, the installation redesigns the environment, creating a perfect synthesis between architecture and nature, history and contemporary art.

Walking on the treading surface, the audience becomes the protagonist of a collective performance, shattering the mirrors.

On the shattered floor “float”, as testimonies emerged from the abysses, some artifacts from the “Paolo Orsi” Archaeological Museum in Syracuse, in dialogue with colored spheres made by the artist himself: they are heavy stone “bullets” from ancient catapults, which become here mysterious, metaphysical objects, with a strong symbolic and formal value.

Then exhibited in a second room, focusing on the graphic and design aspect of the work, are fragments of capitals found on site, historical-architectural memories juxtaposed with other works by Pirri: two new drawings and a mirror maquette dedicated to Maniace, along with a series of recent watercolors.

The arrival of Steps at Maniace, the brainchild of curator Helga Marsala, was made possible thanks to ADITUS, the Sicilian Region’s concessionaire for additional services to major archaeological and cultural sites in eastern Sicily: in close collaboration with the Superintendence of Cultural and Environmental Heritage of Syracuse, Aditus produced and realized the installation that inside the historic building gives life to a radical transformation, between aesthetic and symbolic suggestions, in a multiplication of light, space, lines, forms; the ceiling and walls, splitting and fragmenting on the mirror, destined to shatter under the weight of thousands of steps, produce new, dilated, plural, irregular images.

Image: Setting up the Sala Hypostila in the Castello Maniace in Syracuse for Alfredo Pirri’s installation Passi (2021). Ph.Credit Iole Carollo. Courtesy Regione Siciliana/ADITUS.

For the first time in Sicily, Alfredo Pirri's installation of walkable mirrors

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