Renato Leotta Crafts a Divine Cosmology from Sicilian Soil

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 252, ‘Remapping’

‘Istituto Sicilia’ – an occasional series of publications compiled and edited by Italian artist Renato Leotta – was born, according to its editorial statement, ‘out of the idea of imagining Sicily as a fluctuating entity in the Mediterranean’. In addition to two volumes focused on topics pertaining to regions of Sicily, Leotta has published two issues of Sicilia: a magazine-like compendium of writing commissioned from academics, curators and art historians on subjects relating to the island’s history, geography and cultural past.

The pilot issue was published on the occasion of Leotta’s 2021 exhibition, ‘Mondo: Museo Archeologico del Reale’ [The World: Archaeological Museum of the Real], curated by Claudio Gulli, who also co-edited the issue with Leotta and co-curator Pietro Scammacca. The show was held in Catania – close to Acireale, where Leotta’s family are from – at Palazzo Biscari, home to a collection of antiquities known as ‘Museo Biscari’ that were owned by the fifth Prince of Biscari, Ignazio Paternò Castello. Scammacca, in his contribution to the issue, describes the museum as ‘post-seismic’, since it opened to the public following an eruption on Mount Etna and an earthquake in 1693 that devastated large areas of Sicily’s east coast. Biscari’s collection of classical objects, unearthed in the aftermath of this natural disaster, was organized ‘according to a mythological order’, Scammacca notes, and arranged by deity rather than the standards of European taxonomy, ‘as if [Biscari’s] archaeological endeavours were aimed at reconstructing a divine cosmology buried underneath the decomposed Sicilian soil’. By 1930, the museum ‘was completely left to entropy’.

Over two years, Leotta, Gulli and Scammacca researched the collection, with the artist eventually replacing the ‘Naturalia’– objects once part of Museo Biscari which had found their way into other collections – with his own artworks in the exhibition. He chose pieces that he associated with the sky, the earth and the shore and organized them according to a ‘natural cosmological index’, devised by himself and Scammacca. As Sofia Gotti writes in her contribution to Sicilia’s pilot issue: ‘The objects are (dis)ordered according to a system based on the observation of nature, attempting to reflect the morphology of the Sicilian territory outside the walls of the institution.’ Antiquity’s relationship to Sicily’s geology is as important as it is to its history. This ‘unfolding of time’, Leotta tells me, is not only explored in Sicilia: broader abstract notions of temporality are fundamental to his practice.

By incorporating environmental conditions particular to southern Italy into his work, on view this summer at Sprovieri in London, Leotta often ruminates on the Mediterranean as a metaphysical region. For ‘Multiverso’ (Multiverse, 2015–ongoing), for example, he dips blue-dyed cotton fabric into the sea, which leaves a salt line as the tide goes out that remains visible when the works dry. In another series, ‘Lunagramma’ (Lunagram, 2016–ongoing), he places photographic paper beneath sea anemones and exposes it to moonlight. The resulting black and white images are titled in reference to photograms, since they’re made using a similar process. A series of plaster casts, ‘Gipsoteca’ (2015–ongoing), depicts the undulating shapes of sand on shores around the Mediterranean. Sculpturally, they are moulds of the sea; however, in another nod to antiquity, Leotta has titled them after the Italian name for galleries usually reserved for plaster casts of classical statues. In his artistic practice and in ‘Istituto Sicilia’, nature and culture are recognized as inseparable, refuting the artificial bifurcation that occurred in western societies during the enlightenment, described by Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern (1991) as the ‘Great Divide’.

Where Leotta’s artwork tends towards the formally poetic – natural elements, such as planetary orbits and tidal patterns, play a tangible role in their making – the contents of Sicilia are more archaeological, like an excavation of little-known or forgotten histories related to the island’s natural landscape. In Sicilia’s second issue, Valérie Da Costa’s and Andreas Petrossiants’s respective essays on Paul Thek and Pier Paolo Pasolini highlight features of Sicily’s terrain reflected in or influencing their subjects’ works: the lemon groves in Casteldaccia walked through by Thek; the lapilli (volcanic ash) from Mount Etna where several Pasolini films were set. With his Sicily-focused publication, Leotta preserves, as he writes in its second issue, ‘the sea and sky as linchpins’ of each article .

This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘Island Treasures’

Renato Leotta’s ‘Unfolding of Time’ is on view at Sprovieri, London, until 5 September

^{Main image: Sicilia (detail), Issue 2023. Courtesy: Istituto Sicilia, Acireale}