Arts’ Meeting/Melting. From a Strategy for Recovering Sicilian Abandoned Buildings, to a New Artistic Process

In the last decades in Sicily, a huge number of abandoned buildings and places (of different origins) has been detected and catalogued. Their main characteristic is the trace of the human presence and activity, now disappeared for different reasons. They are mostly industrial architecture, historical ancient buildings in a state of advanced ruin, abandoned quarries, even illegal buildings that were once abusive. A part of them has been recently catalogued, studied and refurbished, generating new possibilities of fruition. At the same time a growing number of young contemporary artists demonstrate that cultural activities in Sicily are progressively growing. Whilst in the past the great Sicilian artists (such as Renato Guttuso, Fausto Pirandello, Bruno Caruso) had to migrate to northern Italy to find a successful opportunity, now a huge number of young artists, who begin to know the market high quotations, choose, as a challenge, to remain in the island, finding new opportunities and awakening also in the great artists the interest to return to be active in the island. The result of these two phenomena is a crossing-over that made Arts, in the broadest sense of theword, converge in an unprecedented combination that represents a new opportunity for local economy, as well as it assumes new ethical, cultural and semiotic meanings.