In the early mornings, the sound of horse’s clip-clopping on the cobbled Billiemi marble of Palermo’s streets feels timeless. My experience of these echoic memories from across the ages is as strong as the sensory reflections certain aromas evoke. Later in the day, horses harnessed to ornate open carriages stand as their drivers idle, smoking and gossiping on Via Vittorio Emanuele, waiting for tourist fares. The odor of horses is ever present in Palermo’s ancient inner-city streets. It sometimes feels as if nothing has changed in the last one hundred years. Horses feel as if they’re part of the city’s sense of overlaying loss. Their contemporary presence lends an air of surreality to Palermo’s undercurrent of historic madness.
Last year while visiting on an extended sojourn, I often spent a part of my mornings lying beneath the Greek-Italian artist Jannis Kounellis’ Untitled series of nineteen old-fashioned wardrobes and cupboards. These unexpected objects are hung by steel wires from the ceiling on the first floor of the Palazzo Riso, home to Palermo’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Kounellis’ menacing flotilla of gravity defying objects loom overhead like a flock of heavy wooden birds. My experience of lying on the cool polished terrazzo floor beneath these airborne old cupboards, some with doors open dangling carelessly, is an intimate ‘suspension of disbelief’. This momentary flight of logic and rationality is an experience created by sheer daring, both mine and the artist’s. It is an artwork that invariably sent me out on my day’s journey exploring Palermo in a state of boundless wonderment. The installation opened my sensory pores to the potencies of the many myths and superstitions I frequently came across in the City of Happiness. It became one of my most favourite rituals, an inventive reverence of the flight of human creative imagination.
I kept running into the moon during those hot early July days. That morning, it was the fourth time we’d met in the last week. First, on Monday when it was being assembled on the pavement outside Giardino dei Giusta (Garden of the Righteous). There was something essentially convincing about its arced, white-painted slatted timber form rearing upwards in its rawest state. Workers crawled over its emerging shape with nails held between pursed lips, hammers dangling from worn leather tool belts. The next day though, it had not moved, the moon seemed to have become more secure in its identity. An indigo blue ‘sky’ of felt had been attached to its base. A day later, in a park closer to my home, the moon’s incarnation as a float for the upcoming Santa Rosalia festival parade was almost complete. White fluffy cotton ‘cloud’ pads were being stapled onto its nether regions. Santa Rosalia, dressed in pastel green robes, her long blonde hair rippling in pasty curls, had been erected to look as if she was astride it.
Continue reading “The Moon in Palermo” by Jane Rankin-Reid
THE CITY KEY 