Gabriella Ciancimino

The Sicilian Winery Cottanera, in collaboration with Gilda Lavia Gallery, launches the first stage of  Cottanera Visioni art project, with the inauguration of Liberty Flowers, a solo exhibition by the artist Gabriella Ciancimino. Cottanera Visioni is the artistic exhibition that will host an artist and his works in the cellar every year with the aim of creating an open-air museum on the slopes of the volcano, a source of suggestion for visitors to the cellar, for those who work there, anyone who wishes to discover our districts. A new project that will support the main activity of the company by enhancing the unique spaces that the Etna area offers.

"I have always cultivated a passion for art, after all I am convinced that even wine is an artistic form - explains Mariangela Cambria, Cottanera. - Cottanera Visioni is a new artistic season that we offer to the place that hosts us, to return part of the value it represents for our family. And it is also a way to tell, with a new language, the strong bond with the land of the volcano that offers us such unique and varied wines ».
Starting from Sunday 30 May 2021, the spaces of the Cellar, located on the slopes of Etna, will welcome the artist's works in a path that includes a body of works created from 2016 up to more recent productions.
The Liberty Flowers exhibition is accompanied by a catalog and an extract from the text Being freedom: Gabriella Ciancimino in conversation with Attilia Fattori Franchini, in which the artist tells how the Radio Fonte Centrale_Stazione Etna project was born, created ad hoc for the Cottanera Winery .

"After a visit to the Cottanera estate and a dip in the beautiful countryside at the foot of Mount Etna in which it is immersed, the element that most attracted my attention was a lava stone artefact in the center of one of the vineyards. It is a pyramid-shaped stony ground, created by local peasants by stacking the stones during the misalignment of the ground. This structure and other similar ones scattered along the slopes of Etna have aroused the curiosity of scholars - including Egyptologists - so much so that they have been nicknamed "the pyramids of Etna." Some pyramids have a rectangular, square, conical and stepped base, built with the dry stone laying technique. However, once the hypothesis that Etna was the new Valley of the Kings was debunked, the study of stoneworkers was shelved. I decided to dedicate my Radio Fonte Centrale_Stazione Etna project to these structures, real monuments to the work of the farmers of yesterday and today. In these structures I read a return to the working of the earth, understood as a possible response to the contemporary historical moment and the result of a greater awareness of one's personal role in global social and economic mechanisms. This takes place through the re-evaluation of the microcosmic aspects compared to the macrocosmic ones, through the recovery of ancient cultures, respecting the climate and the territory ».