In this episode of Art Destination Sicily, artist Aurora Passero joins us from her Oslo studio to reflect on her creative journey. Growing up in Norway, Aurora was immersed in textiles through her grandmother’s sewing and her mother’s costume design for film. Those early tactile encounters with wool, linen, velvet, and embroidery continue to shape her work today.

Aurora shares how her father’s Sicilian roots inspired her recent residency at SARP on Mount Etna, where she balanced family life with artistic deadlines. She describes weaving with nylon and local Sicilian wool, exploring the tension between synthetic and organic materials, and creating site-specific works that engage directly with space, atmosphere, and audience.

Through stories of travelling with her artist husband and children, Aurora reveals how family, process and place intertwine in her practice.

In this conversation, we explore how staging echoes her mother’s influence and how atmosphere itself becomes a narrative in art.

Alessandro Giorgi joins Art Destinations Sicily to reflect on his childhood in a remote Sicilian fishing village Torretta Granitola which he describes as an island within an island. His childhood memories of migrant boats arriving from North Africa in the night and the unspoken presence of the Mafia have found their way into his art. Alessandro discusses his shift from architecture to art, and how drawing became both a meditative practice and a democratic tool.

Alessandro’s work flows across mediums—murals, stop-motion, and fluid drawings. His imagery responds to the rhythms of the sea, resisting borders and tracing connections across place and imagination.

Step inside Palazzo Butera in Palermo with director Claudio Gulli, where the private collection of Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi transforms the historic palace into an experimental playground for drawing links between ancient art and contemporary culture.

Palazzo Butera displays art as if in a lived-in home, inviting you to feel comfortable and make unexpected connections between historic masterpieces, contemporary works and decorative arts.

In this episode, Claudio speaks about the Valsecchi vision, Palermo’s role as a cultural crossroad, and on how a collection can be viewed as an artwork in its own right.

Vienna-born artist Hanna Burkart has spent over a decade without a permanent home, creating art through walking, sleeping and living in places across the world. In this conversation, she shares how site-specific works emerge from deep engagement in landscapes — from sleeping under the stars to transforming abandoned spaces — and how her nomadic life shapes her art.

In this episode of Art Destinations Sicily, Palermo-based artist Irene Coppola shares how her fight-specific art practice draws on walking to connect with the city's layered histories. Through observing, collecting, and moving through the streets, she reveals how Palermo’s fractured coastline continues to reflect the power of the past in shaping the present.

We discuss the legacy of WWII Allied bombings, the Mafia’s role in the Sack of Palermo, and the growing push to restore public access to the sea amid international investment and environmental clean-up efforts.

Irene also reflects on Mammelloni her poetic documentary co-directed with Ruben Monteiro, and spaziomateria, the art space she co-founded with architect Vito Priolo.

Her work speaks to how artists can uncover the hidden stories of a city—and join the fight for a more just and liveable urban future.

In this episode of Art Destinations Sicily, we speak with contemporary artist Francesco Vullo, whose sculptural practice explores the tension between permanence and ephemerality. Born in Caltanissetta in central Sicily and now based in Milan, Vullo reflects on his deep connection to the island’s geology, drawing on childhood memories of rock collecting with his geologist uncle and stories of sulphur miners from his family’s past.

Vullo shares how he works with materials like limestone, lava rock, and plastic bands to create poetic installations about environmental fragility, emotional states and deep time. From sculpting volcanic stone in his countryside studio to showing work during Milan Art Week, Vullo balances the very different two worlds.

In this episode we cover:

Follow Francesco Vullo’s work on our Instagram page @artdestinations.podcast 

In this episode, we speak with Vito Planeta, who is shaping the cultural direction of Planeta Wineries by building on the vision of his late uncle, the winemaker and cultural advocate Vito Planeta (1966–2023). Together, they shared a belief in the connection between land, wine and contemporary art.

We discuss how the family’s estates across Sicily have become active sites for cultural engagement through the Culture for the Territory program, which commissions visual art, performance, music and literature. From a lakeside library dedicated to the late Vito to artworks embedded across five vineyard sites, Planeta Wineries is reframing the role of wine production in the cultural life of the island.

The conversation also explores the challenges of sustainability, the responsibilities of legacy, and how art can shift perceptions of Sicily from periphery to cultural centre.

We are in conversation with Sicilian artist and scholar Elisa Giardina Papa whose practice explores subjects that resist definition.

Elisa lives and works between New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily, and teaches Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She was one of the artists invited by curator Cecilia Alemani to exhibit in the main international exhibition of the 59th Venice Art Biennale in 2022, The Milk of Dreams.

Our conversation delves into the first two works in her trilogy set in Sicily—installations that blend myth, memory, and submerged histories, both literal and metaphorical.

In She Flickered In and Out of History, Elisa explores the story of a short-lived volcanic island that emerged between Tunisia and Sicily in 1831. Claimed by various European powers before disappearing beneath the sea just five months later, the island becomes a symbol of ungovernability and resistance to imperialism.

We also discuss U Scantu: A Disorderly Tale, presented at the Venice Biennale 2022, which reimagines the mythic figure of the Donna di Fora—queer, multispecies women healers—drawing on both oral folklore and Inquisition archives. Set against the backdrop of the postmodern town of Gibellina, the work brings together sonic street culture, ceramics, and archival fragments to challenge how histories are told.

Elisa reflects on her Sicilian upbringing, the layered cultural influences of the island, and her interest in forms of knowledge that defy categorisation. Together we explore what it means to live, think, and create on the edges — where ground shifts, language carries memory and stories flicker in and out of view.

Alfio Puglisi in conversation with podcast host Sarah Rhodes on how the Sicily Artist in Residence Program (SARP) is transforming Sicily into a global hub for contemporary art through site-specific residencies, local collaboration, and atmospheric place-making.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Sarah Rhodes speaks with the podcast’s co-producer Alfio Puglisi — founder of the Sicily Artist in Residence Program (SARP) — about returning to his ancestral home on the slopes of Mount Etna to forge a new vision for contemporary art in Sicily. Alfio shares his remarkable journey: from studying economics and the digital economy and society at King’s College London to teaching in Lisbon, and ultimately leaving behind a secure academic career to pursue something more entrepreneurial and creatively rooted. That shift led him back to Linguaglossa, where he transformed his family’s 17th-century palazzo into a living museum, restaurant, contemporary gallery and residency program.

Through SARP, Alfio brings together international and local artists, offering them space, support, and time to develop site-responsive work. The program emphasises collaboration with local artisans, curators, and Sicilian production facilities, ensuring that exhibitions are deeply embedded in place. These are not parachute residencies, but long-form engagements that invite artists to slow down, adapt, and attune to Sicily’s layered histories and landscapes.

Together, they discuss:

This episode offers a meditation on place, return and reinvention. As Alfio says, Sicily’s position at the centre of the Mediterranean offers not just geography, but perspective — a place to think, to feel, and to make without distraction.

Listen in as we reflect on the links between atmosphere and art-making, the value of community and continuity, and how peripheral places can become sites of deep cultural transformation.

In this premiere episode of Art Destinations Sicily, we introduce the artists and key themes that will be explored in season. We look at how artists engage with the layered geographies of Sicily — a place shaped by ancient myths, volcanic terrain, and a complex cultural inheritance. Through residencies and site-responsive projects, the artists featured in this season reveal how creative practice emerges from deep entanglements with land, memory, and material.

Our conversations begin with this podcast’s co-producer and Sicily Artist-in Residence Program (SARP) director Alfio Puglisi. And then we have the privilege of meeting Elisa Giardina Papa (Italy’s Venice Biennale 2022 artist), Vito Planeta (Planeta Wines), Irene Coppola (artist and Spaziomateria, Palermo), Francesco Vullo (artist), Claudio Gulli (art historian, Palazzo Butero, Palermo), Hanna Burkart (artist), Aurora Passero (artist) and Alessandro Giorgi (artist).

The key ideas are:

Collaborating with Place

Reimagining Cultural Identity

The Sicily season reveals that working from the edge — whether spatially or culturally — creates rich opportunities to rethink place, practice, and belonging. Artists in this season treat the island not only as a site, but as a way of being.

We hope you enjoy this season of Art Destinations Sicily.

Each episode is released fortnightly. Subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on your preferred listening platform. such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and explore the visual works of our guests via @artdestinations.podcast on Instagram.