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Palermo, near Sicily’s northwest corner, is extraordinary. Its mix of Baroque allure and edgy energy defies description, beggars belief. It is a portal to Sicily’s ancient history: Greek temples, distinguished Arab intellectual culture and twelfth century Norman cathedrals; golden hills and grey rock formations, wine, oranges and bitter almonds. All these are glorious, but Palermo is an intoxication. As the bedazzled Goethe wrote in 1787, ‘To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything’.1
Right now Palermo is the clue to Sicily. Way beyond shabby chic, the city’s tarnished magnificence is a cruel reminder of wealth made and wasted in this beautiful troubled place, with its appalling history of colonisation and neglect, and recent struggles for supremacy between the Mafia and the Italian state.2 It was a provocative frame for Manifesta 12, the latest edition of the European Nomadic Biennial conceived in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet empire and the cessation of the Cold War’s familiar uncertainties.3 But where better in contemporary Europe, right now, for this consistently subtle project than at the meeting place of Europe, Africa and the East? As Manifesta’s website says, very simply: ‘Why Palermo? The City of Palermo was important for Manifesta’s selection board for its representation of two important themes that identify contemporary Europe: migration and climate change and how these issues impact our cities’.4
The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence is a marriage of progressive Dutch efficiency, Sicilian commitment to political change, and the island’s egregious beauty. It worked perfectly. Manifesta’s locations are deliberately edgy, often in both senses: as its website... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline