Sasha Vinci, an Italian artist born in Modica and based in Scicli, develops a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses sculpture, installation, performance, video, sound, and participatory methodologies, investigating the relationship between intimate and collective dimensions, memory and social transformation, poetic imagination and political tension. His research is grounded in an ongoing reflection on the connections between human beings, landscape, and community, exploring fragility as a generative condition capable of opening spaces for listening, connection, and resistance. Through the concept of Internaturalism, Vinci challenges established hierarchies between the human and the non-human, nature and culture, center and periphery, transforming the artistic gesture into an act of care and an exercise in political imagination.

Trilogy of Shadows constitutes one of the most significant bodies of his recent work, a project articulated in three acts in which shadow becomes both metaphor and critical device, a symbolic space where memories, traumas, and possibilities of rebirth are deposited. Far from being a mere absence of light, shadow emerges as a fertile and shared territory, capable of revealing the conditions of vulnerability that connect individuals, communities, and landscapes. The project as a whole reflects on the potential of art to operate as a reparative practice, capable of restoring visibility and voice to what has been marginalized, removed, or silenced.

The works that compose the trilogy unfold through a complex dialogue between performative action, environmental installation, luminous sculpture, and sound composition. In the first act, The Weight of Shadows, the demolition of an unauthorized structure that concealed the rupestrian church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta in Scicli assumes the value of a symbolic and political gesture aimed at re-establishing a relationship between architecture, landscape, and collective memory. This action becomes the point of departure for a broader reflection on the forms of oppression embedded within territories and social structures.

The Land of Shadows, the second chapter of the project, translates the documentation of that event into a complex multimedia installation that combines moving images, sculptural elements, and spatial devices. Here, shadow is transformed into shared matter, acquiring both physical and symbolic consistency that invites viewers to confront what normally remains invisible. The work generates a space of passage and awareness, where aesthetic experience and critical reflection converge.

In the third act, The Light of Shadows, the local event in Scicli expands into a universal dimension. The gesture of demolition becomes a metaphor for every process of liberation from structures of domination that permeate contemporary society, including patriarchy, gender-based violence, resource exploitation, and the wounds inflicted upon territories. Sound assumes a central role through The Song of Palestine, created in collaboration with musician Vincent Migliorisi. In this work, the 1946 territorial line is translated into a musical score, generating a cyclical melody that symbolically gives voice to a land and a people suspended within an unresolved historical condition.

The installation further unfolds through a landscape of suspended luminous sculptures reproducing the sky visible simultaneously above Venice and Gaza during the summer solstice. Emerging from darkness as fragile yet persistent apparitions, the constellations construct a symbolic geography that connects distant places through a shared experience of the celestial sphere. Light thus becomes both a poetic and political element, capable of transforming pain and oppression into a collective presence and a possibility for connection.

The performance accompanying the installation introduces an additional layer of meaning. Drawing upon the Sicilian tradition of Uomo Vivo and the celebration of U Gioia, Vinci transforms the radiant beams traditionally surrounding the figure of Christ in the procession into a heavy metal structure that the artist carries laboriously through the space. The action produces a fracture between collective memory and historical reality, between the desire for emancipation and the burden of conditions that limit the capacity to act. The body thus becomes a site of resistance and testimony, assuming the symbolic weight of a community and its contradictions.

Through the combination of sound, light, sculpture, and performance, Trilogy of Shadows constructs a poetic and political cosmology in which the personal and the collective, the local and the universal, memory and contemporaneity coexist within a constellation of images and meanings. Vinci’s works function as relational devices capable of transforming the exhibition space into a site of shared experience, where art does not merely represent the world but actively intervenes in its possibilities for imagination, awareness, and transformation.