Street art in Favara

Street art in Favara

© Ligama

Street art work in Sicily

Street art work in Sicily

© Ligama

Open air street art

Open air street art

© Ligama

Ligama: the Sicilian street art that I would like


To understand what it means to do street art in Sicily and how to make the most of it we have entrusted one of its main protagonists. Ligama, born in 1986 is an eclectic Sicilian artist. “Or at least I try,” he specifies “and more generally I love art in its fullness and multitude and I do not love labels and categories, although I understand they are necessary to not get lost in too many ‘isms'”. In reality, he is one of the most respected and appreciated street artists and has managed to make art in a particular way, creating works in which painting is based on the place that every sound emits, each wavelength belongs to a chromatic value. With him we talked about street art, dreams and projects. And yes, even those fortuitous and wonderful encounters you can only do in Sicily.

Ligama, which is the place of the heart in Sicily where you painted your favorite piece?
Maybe it’s Farm Cultural Park, in Favara in the province of Agrigento. Because I had the feeling (and it happened to me a few times in my life) to find myself in the right place, not to feel “wrong”. The Farm is a paradox, so I like it, because it is the perfect synthesis of things that make me feel good: you find yourself in the historic center, so you have that very high human value that only perceives in small communities (something that stirs me happy memories related to my childhood lived in the streets of the historic center of Caltagirone) and at the same time you are surrounded by contemporary art with all its sequins and its ability to make you feel cosmopolitan and at the center of the world. It may happen that the old lady neighbor makes you taste the sauce that has prepared for lunch, as would your beloved grandmother and two minutes later talk to the minister of culture who knows what nation of who knows what intentions or theories. Speaking in strict Sicilian and English in the same conversation I find it really unusual and fun.

The Sicilian place where would you like to paint?
I would like to paint in Gibellina or anyway in the territory of Gibellina. Because it is a place where there is everything: there are history, tragedy, wounds, rebirth. Because art and landscape (which are my current “obsessions”) are perfectly linked, more than in any other place, indeed, I dare say that art and landscape are mutually indispensable to Gibellina and this is a wonderful thing in my opinion. I think it’s one of the biggest museums in Italy, something that is unprecedented in art. I think that Sicily has not yet noticed how much importance is kept in those places and how much resonance Gibellina may have in the world: a diamond that is not yet completely polished.

Your favorite Sicilian street artist?
(laughing) Demetrio Di Grado.

What about street art in Sicily?
I think that it is not doing anything new with respect to the rest of the world and with respect to the revolution that urban art has already done, bringing art out of ordinary places. Making it extraordinary, for the greatness of the works and for the fact of finding them under the nose when absent-minded go shopping.

And what about the added value of street art in Sicily?
The great value of street art in Sicily in my opinion is in the relationship with the landscape, in the link with the territory and in the human relationships it creates. It is one of the few cultural operations that is really replenishing the connective tissues. In my opinion the right role of art in Sicily is precisely that of taking care of places. You can not disregard what surrounds you and I think that the artists who come to work here perceive it even more. In Sicily the enchantment still lingers in people’s eyes, for this reason one of the strengths of art here lies precisely in authenticity: because the cities are not really so city, because a little ‘you perceive the fact of being “far away”, because the story is cumbersome, the stories are so many, the population is not indifferent and the artists can not help being influenced by all this. And make more authentic works than usual.

Your future plans?
I have a few projects to be set up in the near future between Rome and Milan. And then there is my project “Uncommissioned Landscape Manipulation” (from the artist has painted the sounds of the places on the ruins of the Sicilian countryside, through an algorithm invented by an engineer who translates the sounds into colors): it will go on and will continue to change the atavistic aspect of the Sicilian landscape … at least as long as I have colors!