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.
Project: Nathalie Harb
Commissioned by Fondazione Agrigento capitale 2025 and Italian Ministry of Culture
Concept Development: Pamela Erbetta, Lea Kayrouz
Research: Lea Kayrouz
Artistic Consultant: Pamela Erbetta
Architecture Development: Alex Tzortsis de Paz
Project Manager: Gabriele Pascolini
Project Coordinator And Territorial Expert: Gaetano di Ballo
Composer: Youmna Saba
Sound Design: Andrea Gerlando Terrana
Lullaby Workshop Conductors: Veronica Racito, Michele Piccione
Construction: Jesse Gagliardi
Construction Assistant: Andréa Cardoso, Catarina Fernandes
Upholsterers: Salvatore e Isabella di Giacomo
Visual Identity: Lama Zouein
Video And Photo Documentation: Davide Amato, Panna Eszenyi
Silent Room Keeper: Rita Bonsignore, Adomah Westimy
Hospitality Coordinator: Elvira Mangione
With the participation of Coro Villabella, Volontariato Vincenziano, Gruppo Missionario, Pippo Rizzo, Pro Music Studio, Adomah Westimy, Adriana Lopez, Alvaro Diaz, Alessandro Di Stefano, Andrea Cardoso, Calogero Maria Coniglio, Catarina Fernandes, Celine Jaeger, Daniela Civiltà, Eleonora Tsaousi, Felipe Silva, Federico De Marni, Giovanni Emiliano Grasso, Giovanni Tuzzolino, Giuseppe Mirabile, Imane Qazbour, Laura Horvath, Maria Grazia Abate, Mihai Ghinet, Naiara González, Noemi Weiss, Olga Dernova, Rita Bonsignore, Roberta Canzoneri, Salvatore Russello, Saúl Torres, Stefano Castronovo, Vincenza Sabrina D'Anna, Adriana Spoto, Angela Sciortino, Antonella Brucceri, Antonia Spoto, Concetta Attardo, Dina Graceffa, Domenica Catuara, Enza Cannella, Marcella Puletto, Maria Teresa Zammuto, Maria Zaccaria, Maurizio Stagno, Patrizia Geraci, Pippo Rizzo, Rosalia Pirrone, Rosetta Zaccaria, Sonia Cannistraro
Supported by Fontes Episcopi, Vela Wine