Arriving on the highest of the three hills on which stands Ficarra, a Sicilian municipality of 1275 inhabitants located in Messina’s metropolitan area, one walks among the remains of the ancient cloister builded by the St. Francis Friars Minor Observant, also called the Convent of the Hundred Arches. This name recalls the original architecture of the building, once surrounded by twenty-five round arches on each side, built in the 11th century by an order of Basilian monks and, from its reconstruction in 1522 until the confiscation of ecclesiastical property by the Savoys in 1866, the second library of Sicily after that of Palermo. To this day, the perimeter walls, portal, apse and one of the ancient round arches from the adjacent church of Santa Maria del Gesù remain.
Francesca Baglieri, “The Passage of Gold (round)”, 2025, acrylic on olive sansa and wood, 50 x 50 cm, courtesy of the artist
Precisely this arch, a symbol that presents itself as an architectural frame, a formal survival and a repository of time layers, can be a coordinate through which narrate the research of Francesca Baglieri (Modica, 1997) and her residency in this ancient and complex territory. The project, curated by Mario Bronzino, is part of the artist residencies program undertaken by the management of Palazzo Milio, aimed at welcoming and materializing, having as its epicenter the “Silk Room” on the second floor, unpublished experiences of this fuzzy land: a natural and human geography of practices in which a certain archaic dimension of existence escapes from the pastoral and Arcadian idyll, whilst materializing itself in the folds of work, daily life and community existence. Baglieri’s research moves precisely in this fabric of times and durations, shaping those subtle persistences of gestures, forms and practices that persist in a certain territorial constellation. The artist’s gaze is in fact always a situated one, free of any pre-establishment, porous in its activation through dialogue and relationship, in an almost osmotic contact with its contemplative scenario.
Francesca Baglieri, “The passage of gold (ceremonial with roundel)”, 2025, acrylic on olive sansa, resin and wood, 350 x 244 cm, site specific installation (detail), courtesy of the artist
The residency in Ficarra fits fully into this existential and poetic posture that Baglieri assumes toward the surrounding reality, conceived as a network of processes, materials and knowledge handed down from generation to generation: a skein built over time, slowly and stubbornly, from which it is possible to draw, with care and delicacy, some images, forms and symbols born as from contact with their natural and human referential ‘support’, which, in this case, is the community of Ficarra. The latter is bound for the most part around the oliva minuta, planted in more than 90 percent of the olive groves on the Nebrodi massif: it is a unique territorial product, processed annually starting in October and November (through hand-harvesting) and then through cold milling in the following months. Baglieri enters the plot of this process, which is not explicit in its economic value (the oil produced is used for family subsistence) as much as in its being the gravity center of relationships, oral transmissions, ancient processing techniques, and an “almost parental relationship” with nature – so reports the artist recalling a conversation she had with Giampiero Raffaele, a carpenter with whom Baglieri collaborated during all phases of the three-month residency, in which the relationship with the Frantoio Lenzo, run by the eponymous family, was also crucial.
Francesca Baglieri, “The passage of gold (on two roundels)”, 2025, wood and acrylic on olive sansa, 200 x 180 cm (detail), courtesy of the artist
But most of all, the oliva minuta, with its small shape and the consequent attention given to grinding, is a symbol of a structural bond with seasonal territorial rhythms, and consequently a lived (worked) symbol of a cyclical, archaic temporality. The shape of the circle, its curvatures and circumvolutions on itself, also return, recalling the uninterrupted movement of the ancient circular millstones (reactivating them after a suspension would have costs, so families provide with a rotation to constantly follow the progress of the work), and the discs of sansa – the paste formed from the compressed production waste – first filtered and then pressed by jute discs with organic and slightly irregular shapes. It is precisely such discs that become the matrix of Baglieri’s artistic operation, who uses the sansa to make roundels, then integrated with acrylic interventions and affixed to a wooden support. Looking at this corpus, which also dictates the symbolic texture of the residency’s final exhibition, titled “Il passaggio dell’oro” (opened Feb. 2, 2025 and on view through May 31, 2025), one is struck by the irregular vagaries of the sansa circumferences, directly formed in the contingency of pressure at the hands of jute. It is not a perfect circle, because it is a lived one, born of human, technological, traditional, archaic actions, until it flexes back on itself to become a symbol of this anthropological fabric that is its basis. Baglieri then works in this bending: she makes it possible with equally nuanced gestures, such as the acrylic framework that reinforces the rhythm of the circle, or the wooden support that creates body and volume to what daily dissolves into a more layered process.
Francesca Baglieri, “The Passage of Gold (Ceremonial with Roundel)”, 2025, acrylic on olive sansa, resin and wood, 350 x 244 cm, site specific (detail), courtesy of the artist
That of Baglieri could metaphorically be said to be an alchemical gesture; the symbolic distillation of a territory: a slow, careful and contemplative process within which to create out of phase sensitive spaces that nevertheless remain anchored to their human and natural matrix, with no demiurgic detachment and no initial tabula rasa. In the wake of this situated amplification, Baglieri also creates two round arches, again in wood, installing the larger one in the area of the Convent of the Hundred Arches, while the smaller one is located inside the Ficarra Oil Museum: in this case, too, the artist operates a displacement of the original architectural function, in order to thicken in these forms the whole deposit of symbols experienced by the village community.
Francesca Baglieri, “The passage of gold (on two roundels)”, 2025, wood and acrylic on olive sansa, 200 x 180 cm, courtesy of the artist
It is no coincidence that the aforementioned pomace rounds, in addition to also being displayed in the Oil Museum’s showcase, are also grafted onto the surface and base of the arches – directly into the lived geography of the village – as if to demonstrate an intimate continuity between durations, but also between architecture and symbols, persistence and process, contemplation and work, with each element finding itself in the name of a shared circularity, curvature and constant return. In light of all this, Francesca Baglieri’s residency is configured as a practice of attention, based on the exploration of the potentialities inherent in the act of staying, or rather, re-staying: staying again, always and continuously, in the symbols, work, and continuities of a certain territory.
Info:
Francesca Baglieri. Il passaggio dell’oro (The passage of gold)
curated by Mario Bronzino
02.02.2025 – 31.05.2025
Museo Palazzo Milio
Via Vittorio Emanuele, 2, Ficarra (ME)
museopalazzomilio@gmail.com
Instagram: @museopalazzomilio
Piermario De Angelis was born in Pescara on 06/10/1997. After graduating from high school he moved to Milan to attend the three-year degree course in Arts, Design and Entertainment at the IULM university. He is currently a second year student of the two-year course of Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. He is a contributor for ‘Juliet Art Magazine’ and ‘Kabul Magazine’. In 2021 he co-founded, together with other students of the Brera Academy, the non-profit cultural association Genealogie Del Futuro: a reality that addresses socio-political and environmental issues through alternative community building practices, through an artistic and curatorial perspective. His research aims to be an exploration of the critical potential of art and images in relation to the urgencies of contemporaneity.
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