RUGGINE by Enzo Venezia
The exhibition design is conceived as a unified spatial device, capable of translating Enzo Venezia’s poetic vision into an environmental form and guiding visitors through an immersive journey into the deep memory of Palermo. The exhibition space does not merely host the artworks; it becomes an active part of the narrative itself—a storytelling structure that orders, contains, and places images, symbols, and fragments of identity in tension with one another.
The project is grounded in a rigorous geometric articulation that directly reflects the artist’s visual language. Grids, alignments, and frontal arrangements construct an environment with a strong theatrical character, in which the works appear as figures on a silent stage. Domes, palm trees, paladins, elements drawn from both the popular and cultivated traditions of the city, together with the dates of Mafia massacres, emerge as symbolic constellations: fragments of a living, irreducible memory, suspended between historical time and a timeless dimension.
As noted by Eva Di Stefano, curator of the exhibition, Venezia’s work stems from the desire to “bear witness to the residual vitality of a Palermo on the verge of extinction, capturing its signs within a stable geometric grid, capable of remaining closed or opening up.” This tension between formal control and emotional density finds a coherent spatial translation in the exhibition design, where geometry becomes a tool for sublimating a complex and stratified imaginary.
The installation supports and reinforces this vision through a conscious choice of formal essentiality. The artworks are arranged according to a frontal, almost scenographic logic that evokes the idea of a theatre of memory: serial figures, like motionless marionettes, presented to the viewer without complacency, yet with lucid distance.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the black room, conceived as a space for immersion and contemplation. Here, the installation heightens the dreamlike and meditative quality of the experience: the walls host black-and-white images that converse through a calibrated interplay of light and shadow, while at the center of the space slender iron sculptures emerge. These light, geometric presences—true guardians of memory—echo the grids of the two-dimensional works and translate their language into three-dimensional form, establishing a continuous dialogue between surface and volume, image and body.
Within the exhibition route, a video projection plays a fundamental role as an immersive and symbolic element. Conceived and directed by Enzo Venezia and realized by Ignazio Lo Manto, with music by Giuseppe Rizzo and text by Giuseppe Di Benedetto, the work depicts an imaginary sky opening above the city. A sky understood as a vast container of memory, in which signs, symbols, and traces of Palermo’s history drift and float.
Images of palm trees, cassatas, paladins, and roses intertwine with references to emblematic places and with memories of Mafia massacres, composing a powerful and suspended visual narrative. The slowed movement of the images and their drift through space transform the projection into a true immaterial architecture: a symbolic dome that both shelters and questions the city, uniting its different souls in a cosmic breath.
The exhibition route is ultimately marked by two highly evocative symbolic extremes. At the beginning, the black square introduces the visitor to an absolute origin; at the end, the red square ideally concludes the journey as a sign of sacrifice and possible rebirth.
Within this balance between formal rigor, space, moving images, and symbolic density, the installation takes shape as a true architecture of memory: an environment designed to slow the gaze and to restore to Palermo a complex narrative, capable of holding together identity and limitation, loss and persistence, silence and voice.
CREDITS
LOCATION: Museo regionale d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea RISO, Palermo, Italy - CLIENT: Enzo Venezia - Exhibition curator: Eva Di Stefano - Exhibition design: Ignazio Lo Manto - Exhibition installation: Scena Aperta - Technical coordinator: Giusi Giacalone - Audio/video services:
V.L.S. Solution s.r.l.s. - Transport and installation support: Merci Service International Movers Palermo s.r.l.
VIDEO INSTALLATION
Concept and direction: Enzo Venezia
Video installation production: Ignazio Lo Manto
Text: Giuseppe Di Benedetto
Music: Giuseppe Rizzo
Photo by Moreno Maggi
