Episode 2: Alfio Puglisi on how SARP is transforming Sicily into a global hub for contemporary art
Episode 2 Alfio Puglisi on how SARP is transforming Sicily into a global hub for contemporary art
Season 3 Sicily
Alfio Puglisi at the opening of Søren Sejr’s exhibition in Linguaglossa, at SARP, 2022
Alfio Puglisi is in conversation with podcast host Sarah Rhodes on how the Sicily Artist in Residence Program (SARP) is transforming Sicily into a global hub for contemporary art through site-specific residencies, local collaboration, and atmospheric place-making.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Sarah Rhodes speaks with the podcast’s co-producer Alfio Puglisi — founder of the Sicily Artist in Residence Program (SARP) — about returning to his ancestral home on the slopes of Mount Etna to forge a new vision for contemporary art in Sicily. Alfio shares his remarkable journey: from studying economics and the digital economy and society at King’s College London to teaching in Lisbon, and ultimately leaving behind a secure academic career to pursue something more entrepreneurial and creatively rooted. That shift led him back to Linguaglossa, where he transformed his family’s 17th-century palazzo into a living museum, restaurant, contemporary gallery and residency program.
Through SARP, Alfio brings together international and local artists, offering them space, support, and time to develop site-responsive work. The program emphasises collaboration with local artisans, curators, and Sicilian production facilities, ensuring that exhibitions are deeply embedded in place. These are not parachute residencies, but long-form engagements that invite artists to slow down, adapt, and attune to Sicily’s layered histories and landscapes.
Together, they discuss:
The personal and political significance of returning home to begin again
Why Sicily’s “peripheral” location may actually be a place of focus and clarity for artists
The interplay between cultural memory, atmospheric conditions, and contemporary creative practice
The red Saharan rain that settles each spring on Sicilian gardens — and how this meteorological phenomenon became the digital pigment for new photographic work by Andre Hemer
How Alfio’s vision for SARP builds on both inherited history and future-facing cultural networks
The growing community of creatives — many returning from cities like London, Paris, and Berlin — who are reshaping Sicily’s role in the international art conversation
This episode offers a meditation on place, return and reinvention. As Alfio says, Sicily’s position at the centre of the Mediterranean offers not just geography, but perspective — a place to think, to feel, and to make without distraction.
Listen in as we reflect on the links between atmosphere and art-making, the value of community and continuity, and how peripheral places can become sites of deep cultural transformation.
