From yesterday until September 6, 2026, Palermo’s historic center is hosting the first edition of Palermo Sound, a festival spread across the historic residences of the Sicilian capital. Four days of events and performances, not just musical ones, bringing the city to life.
In the Giardino dei Giusti, artist Guido Filosto presents a work on materiality that draws the viewer in — from wood marked by memory to hammered copper, worked with the energy of someone trying to bring traces to the surface. The aim is to make the piece a living part of the encounter, one that outlasts the days of the festival.

As art historian and curator Barbara Martusciello observes, «everything has the look of a discovery — as if the work hadn’t been placed there on purpose but had, in some remarkable way, simply appeared. It’s a unicum made of three protagonist forms standing together like a sentinel that doesn’t want to preside but to be possibility and threshold — between past and present (and toward the future), between a before and an after, a here and an elsewhere, an inside and an outside, art and life».

For the project, Guido Filosto (Montecarlo, 1996) worked mainly with tree trunks recovered from the grounds of Palermo’s Policlinico, where they had stood for a long time. It’s a work that speaks to materiality without hiding what’s unknown in it, the “unconfessable natural” that every presence entrusted to life carries with it. Luminous mirrors and interrogating reflections put mask and appearance into play, illuminating what has been reborn from a stretch of land devastated by World War II bombing — the Giardino dei Giusti was in fact built on the ruins of the eighteenth-century Palazzo Greco.

In the story of a South that, through sound and the meeting of different traditions, celebrates a beauty built on sharing, the events of Palermo Sound trace another possible narrative, far removed from the logic of conflict that runs through the present.

Venus’s copper and the presence of an artwork, alive for the length of a shared rhythm, bring back a state of grace that goes beyond today’s habituation and indifference.