KATARÌ × Gibellina Capital 2026
The inaugural edition of KATARÌ
For Gibellina Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026
KATARÌ celebrates Gibellina as the Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026 by transforming extra virgin olive oil into a cultural object capable of bringing together land, memory, and contemporary vision.
Thus, KATARÌ × Gibellina Capitale 2026 is born, the inaugural edition of KATARÌ: an initiative that interprets care for the land, for time, and for relationships as concrete practices of regeneration, in dialogue with the vision of Portami il Futuro, the cultural program accompanying Gibellina in its year as Capital.
The project takes shape through two limited-edition bottles of 200 copies each, created in collaboration with two local artists. Their works give life to a graphic intervention on the label that connects contemporary art, local identity and collective memory.
In this edition, olive oil becomes more than a product: it turns into narrative, testimony, and symbolic gesture. A daily element that holds the memory of a place and contributes to imagining its future.
KATARÌ × Gibellina Capitale 2026 is a tribute to Gibellina’s ability to reinvent itself through culture and art. A project designed to support and promote, even beyond 2026, initiatives of urban, cultural, and territorial regeneration, fostering new forms of dialogue between contemporary art, territory, and community.
Olive oil as a practice of regeneration
Extra virgin olive oil is born from an act of care and regeneration: the care of trees and soil, respect for natural cycles, and the patience required by every transformation.
A practice that finds a profound parallel in the history of Gibellina, a city that, after the earthquake in 1968, has been able to reinvent itself through a long and continuous process, making art a tool for renewal and collective construction.
Like an olive grove, Gibellina also requires care, constant attention, and shared responsibility.
From this vision, KATARÌ × Gibellina Capitale 2026 is born: a project that interprets olive oil not only as a product of the land, but as a symbol of care, memory, and future.
Artists and works:
In the System of Squares of Gibellina, a symbolic space of reconstruction and memory, motionless bodies in red dresses inhabit the architecture with a stubborn presence.
The repetition of the figures along the perspective builds a silent, almost ritual rhythm that crosses the void and transforms it.
Here resistance is not gesture or confrontation, but permanence: a quiet act of existing in a place marked by loss and rebirth.
Carla Sutera Sardo
"The Geometry of Resistance”
Artist Statement:
In the System of Squares of Gibellina, a symbolic space of reconstruction and memory, motionless bodies in red dresses inhabit the architecture with a stubborn presence.
The repetition of the figures along the perspective builds a silent, almost ritual rhythm that crosses the void and transforms it. Here resistance is not gesture or confrontation, but permanence: a quiet act of existing in a place marked by loss and rebirth.
Biography
CARLA SUTERA SARDO (Agrigento, 1983) approached photography for passion during her university years spent between Palermo and Rome. After an initial self-taught approach, focused on self-portraiture, he oriented his research towards a broader experimentation, linked to the most unusual and uncontaminated aspects of the Sicilian landscape. Over time she developed a personal language that allowed her to express an intimate and poetic vision of reality. Her research focuses mainly on the female figure and the relationship between body and landscape, with the intention of creating dreamlike images, suspended in time. His photographs have been published in international magazines such as L'Oeil de la Photographie and Vogue Italia, and have won important awards, including the Sony World Photography Awards, the Siena Photography Awards and the Prix de la Photographie. He has exhibited in numerous cities, including London, Turin, Florence, Milan, Palermo, Zhengzhou, Gibellina, Paris and Slovenia.
Alessandro Giorgi
"Impronte sul Terreno”
Artist Statement:
Flickering lines of a moving landscape. The energy that springs from the earth in all its harmonious and distorted forms. The contrast given by the light of a star that shines and burns. The shadows of a sun at its zenith. Drawing is a gesture of listening, the seismograph that records and visualizes the energy of a place in constant change.
Gibellina has a unique history and present. The transformations undergone and sought alternate with long pauses. The identity of a place that attracts, with its resonance, the international interest of professionals, art lovers and more. Can all this give shape, life, future and memory to a city? What remains and persists are the earth and its fruits as an act of rootedness, care and continuity.
Biography
Alessandro Giorgi (1989, Castelvetrano IT) is a visual artist with a background in architecture, based between Munich and Torretta Granitola, a small fishing village on the southwest coast of Sicily. His work explores drawing as a form of visual storytelling across a wide spectrum of media: canvas, paper, installation and animation. His work has been exhibited in international exhibitions and fairs in Europe, with particular presence in Germany and Italy. Among the most significant exhibitions: the solo exhibitions FOMO (2024, Munich Art Gallery, Munich GER) and The Return Journey (2025, SARP Gallery, Linguaglossa IT), and participation in the international NordArt 2025 fair in Büdelsdorf GER. Alessandro Giorgi was a finalist of the Comic Festival 2019 in Lucerne, CH and selected for the Fluxus Museum Prize 2026 in Paros, GR.
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