Agrigento Capitale Italiana della Cultura 2025
Year 2025
Agrigento
Agrigento is a city of many fragments, socially and urbanistically divided, with the Valle dei Templi cutting through its fabric and producing isolation. As Pirandello observed, identity cannot exist when one remains invisible to others. In Agrigento, this invisibility reverberates as silence across the valley.
Placed in the Valley of the Temples near the Archaeological Museum, The Silent Room offered a collective space for pause and tenderness. Built as a simple wooden structure covered with blankets, its soft walls carried the traces of workshops held across the territory. It honours fragile voices and vulnerable hands as quiet acts of resistance against systems that divide and exploit.
Two workshops stitched these fragments together:
- In Villaseta, at the Biblioteca Sociale, a lullaby workshop with residents, migrants, and Erasmus students under the guidance of Michele Piccione and Veronica Racito grew into Coro Villabella. Their recorded lullaby resonates inside the Silent Room, intertwining with a piece by Youmna Saba.
- In Aragona, a collective embroidery workshop gathered a community of women working in care around long tables to stitch a blanket, a fabric of protection and storytelling, where gestures of tenderness became a shared work.
Standing like a lighthouse in a land of arrivals, The Silent Room reflects Agrigento’s position on the Mediterranean threshold. It affirms that even the most fragile gestures, a song, a stitch, a silence, can become a form of resistance, and a way of imagining care anew.
Design: Nathalie Harb, Gabriele Pascolini and Alex Tzortzis de Paz
Sound Conception and Composition: Youmna Saba
Acoustic Consultancy: 21dB | Acoustics & Audio Consultants
Sound Recordings: Anthony Sahyoun
Project management: Gabriele Pascolini
Visual identity: Lama Zouein
Photography: Agostino Osio, Alto Piano Studio