Life not only imitated art at an exhibition in Sicily this summer — it almost destroyed it. Stefano Cerio’s outdoor photography installation about the devastation wrecked by wildfires was nearly engulfed in a real wildfire on Saturday, reported Artribune.
“A sad, surreal, involuntary performance,” wrote the artist in an Instagram post.
Firemen were able to extinguish the flames as they came only a few feet away from Cerio’s seven large panels installed along a road in the town of Gibellina. Smartphone images taken after the fire show a blackened hill all around the artworks, situated near the entrance to the town.
In a bitter twist, the photographs themselves, installed a month ago, portray scars left from a major 2016 fire in Sicily’s Pantelleria Island National Park. Across the displayed images, a charred forest emerges from a gray mist, glowing red-orange in parts where foliage or the ground have been sprayed with what we later understand is flame retardant.
“I created an environmental work with the red liquid of the flame retardant that I digitally expanded to extend it to entire burned areas,” Cerio told Artribune about the exhibited works, titled The Redemption of Nature.
Firefighters managed to save a photography exhibition about wildfires from a real wildfire in Sicily two days ago. Photo courtesy of the artist, Stefano Cerio.
The show is a part of this year’s site-specific Gibellina Photoroad open-air exhibit, curated by Arianna Catana, within the town’s ongoing art festival, and it is also a preview of Cerio’s forthcoming book, out on September 9th, plus a solo exhibit at the Museo Delle Arti Carrara (MudaC) from September 11 to January 10, 2027. The book and exhibitions share the same title [The Redemption of Nature], and explore areas of the Mediterranean region that have suffered from wildfires, as well as “nature’s ability to regenerate and slowly reclaim its spaces, documenting the phenomenon of ecological succession,” states an exhibit text. To create these works, the artist spent months returning repeatedly to the same fire-damaged places in Sicily and Sardinia, where he observed how these landscapes come back to life from season to season.
This year, wildfires in Sicily accounted for 70 percent of fire-damaged areas in southern Italy, or 24,451 hectares (about 60,420 acres), the equivalent of nearly 35,000 soccer fields, according to a report by the Legambiente environmental organization. This makes the region Italy’s most fire-affected area for the fourth consecutive year. Meanwhile, western Europe continues to experience record-breaking heatwaves and wildfires that have burned over 1.3 million acres as of August 9th, notably in Italy, Spain, and France, per the European Forest Fires Information System.
Panteleria 1 (2026) by Stefano Cerio is one of the photographs featured in the installation at the Gibellina Photoroad open-air art festival in Sicily this summer, as a preview to a book and larger exhibit titled “The Redemption of Nature” at the MudaC in Carrara. This and six other large panel photographs were nearly destroyed in a real wildfire.
