Pizzi (director of Atelier Mitoraj and exhibition curator): "The location made the difference; this park is unique."

The exhibition "Lo sguardo – Humanitas Physis," dedicated to Polish artist Igor Mitoraj and held in Syracuse between the Neapolis Archaeological Park and Castello Maniace on Ortigia and on Mount Etna, in Ragalna, will close on October 31st. Following last Saturday's closing, Luca Pizzi, director of the Mitoraj Atelier and curator of the exhibition, offered his thoughts. "Of course, Mitoraj had to confront the myths," Pizzi comments. "I believe Mitoraj has accompanied the myth of Sicily. For ten years, perhaps even more, we've been organizing exhibitions and displays in spectacular locations, but we've never managed to do something like this. This exhibition is very different from all the others, especially because of the locations. There are four elements that I wanted to evoke, starting from Etna, three symbolic places of Sicily: Etna, Ortigia, and the Neapolis archaeological park. I don't even know how it happened. I thought a chapter had been closed with this region, and instead, after they made me this proposal and after having inspected the park, I realized that something truly different could be done. I think I succeeded. The locations made the difference. This park is different from the others. There's nature, there's Physis, there's humanitas, there are so many things. And then there are the Latomie, which is the aspect that struck me most: these caves, these quarries from which the materials used to build the various temples and monuments were extracted. But who created all this? Man made it: therefore the prisoners, the slaves, who worked inside and who lived in these places. And all this pathos convinced me."