Taobuk, Mattarella at the inauguration of the Isgrò installation

Sicily, the island of literature, returns to the center of the Mediterranean, claiming its role as a hinge between East and West. “The participation of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella in Taobuk is a powerful message of reaffirmation of the central historical and geopolitical significance of Sicily, especially in the momentum of the global postpandemic restart”. The festival will pay tribute to the Head of State, who will attend the celebration of the centenary of the death of Giovanni Verga, one of the fathers of European literature, with a reflection on the role of the South – and of Sicily – as a cultural epicenter: window and crossroads of worlds. The XII edition of Taobuk – Taormina International Book Festival (June 16-20) has the important appointment scheduled for Saturday June 18 at 6 pm in Piazza IX Aprile, where the inauguration of the installation Le farfalle dei Malavoglia, erasing conceived will take place by Emilio Isgrò specifically for the festival, and created with the support of the Sicily Foundation. While in the adjacent former Church of Sant’Agostino, the selection of works by Isgrò, Le Sicilie, will be exhibited. The event, with the emblematic title The island of Literature in the middle of the Mare Nostrum, will be attended by the creator and director of Taobuk Antonella Ferrara, the master of the art of erasing Emilio Isgrò, the writer Paul Auster, one of the giants of contemporary literature , and the Nobel Prize in Physics Giorgio Parisi. He will coordinate the journalist Elvira Terranova, for years at the helm of the Sicilian editorial office of the Adnkronos agency. “We are honored to welcome the President – underlines Antonella Ferrara – in a city like Taormina which in its genius loci carries the immaterial inheritance of settled cultures. This is the profound meaning of a literary festival like Taobuk: to claim the centrality not only geographic but culturally of Sicily, with its three points aimed at all continents. Not a border at the edge of the world, therefore: but a point of contact, a window opened by the European breath. Where literature can bring not consolation, but hope and new energy ”. The anniversary of Verga, the author who in the harshness of his fresco on the cycle of the vanquished tells of resignation, a crude photograph of the society of those times and a mirror of our present, becomes here an opportunity for a transformation. The installation by Emilio Isgrò La farfalle by Malavoglia cancels this sense of resignation. To transform it and tend it towards exchanges and contaminations, which are the figure of the festival, to establish the link between Sicily and the rest of the world. Deletion is not removal, for the Sicilian master born in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, a painter and sculptor of global fame, known for having deleted apparently inviolable texts, from the Divine Comedy to the Promessi Sposi to the Constitution: but it is to question something to reaffirm it. With more force and with more meanings. To act as an ideal continuation of the itinerary, therefore, on Saturday 18 June his selection of works The Sicilies will also be presented in the former Church of S. Agostino: a precious exhibition that is like a small circle of rediscovered stories. Erasing places to remember them better: “Erasing – explains Emilio Isgrò in fact – is not the destructive act that one thinks of. It is saying no in order to say yes to the things that matter, it is an element of reflection ”. Fringing the contours of the island, therefore, is like drawing a richer, more alive edge: the erased Sicily returns to being a virgin land, to be rewritten and re-inhabited. To the Sicilian artist – who will be awarded the Taobuk Award during the gala evening on Saturday 18 June at the Ancient Theater of Taormina – the new format Fuori cornice is dedicated, curated by Roberta Scorranese and Antonella Ferrara, with the collaboration of Marco Bazzini and the support of the Taormina Arte Sicilia Foundation. Thursday 16 June at 6 pm, in Piazza IX Aprile, will open with a conversation with the artist dedicated to high school and university students. Friday 17 June at 10 at the Hotel Villa Diodoro, Isgrò will talk with the historian and jurist Eva Cantarella, for an exchange that will cross over from the artistic sphere. Saturday 18 June at 3 pm, at Palazzo Duchi di Santo Stefano, with the Italianist, literary critic and essayist Antonio Di Grado, the master will also tell about his Autocurriculum, an autobiography that proceeds by gaps and leaps, and also contains a sort of artistic testament: «In reality I did not want to become a painter, nor to remain an indestructible man of letters forever. – writes Isgrò – Anyone else, torn by doubt, would have run to the psychoanalyst: I took care of myself, erasing the words and images together. And thus becoming a full time eraser. Beyond metaphor, to definitively get out of the logic of the avant-gardes, I made the gesture that the avant-gardes themselves had not dared ».