Episode 3: Elisa Giardina Papa on Sicilian Myth and the Venice Biennale
Filming sonic street culture for U Scantu: A Disorderly Tale in Gibellina, Sicily for the Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams 2022
Episode 2: Elisa Giardina Papa on Sicilian myth and the Venice Biennale
Season 3 Sicily
We are in conversation with Sicilian artist and scholar Elisa Giardina Papa whose practice explores subjects that resist definition. Elisa lives and works between New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily, and teaches Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She was one of the artists invited by curator Cecilia Alemani to exhibit in the main international exhibition of the 59th Venice Art Biennale in 2022, The Milk of Dreams.
Our conversation delves into the first two works in her trilogy set in Sicily—installations that blend myth, memory, and submerged histories, both literal and metaphorical.
In She Flickered In and Out of History, Elisa explores the story of a short-lived volcanic island that emerged between Tunisia and Sicily in 1831. Claimed by various European powers before disappearing beneath the sea just five months later, the island becomes a symbol of ungovernability and resistance to imperialism.
We also discuss U Scantu: A Disorderly Tale, presented at the Venice Biennale 2022, which reimagines the mythic figure of the Donna di Fora—queer, multispecies women healers—drawing on both oral folklore and Inquisition archives. Set against the backdrop of the postmodern town of Gibellina, the work brings together sonic street culture, ceramics, and archival fragments to challenge how histories are told.
Elisa reflects on her Sicilian upbringing, the layered cultural influences of the island, and her interest in forms of knowledge that defy categorisation. Together we explore what it means to live, think, and create on the edges—where ground shifts, language carries memory, and stories flicker in and out of view.
BIOGRAPHY
Elisa Giardina Papa’s research-driven practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been disqualified and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Sifting through discarded AI training datasets, censored cinema repositories, or factitious colonial accounts, she traces how recurrent forms of extractive capitalism have strained our capacities for living and laboring. Her work has been exhibited at the 59th Venice Biennale, the Whitney Museum, Gropius Bau, ICA London, among others. EGP lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily, and is a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
