Lindsay Marie Morris

Whether she's upcycling discarded materials or working with clay and sand from Mount Etna, Stefania Boemi's works serve as a heartfelt tribute to Sicily's rich history. The sustainably minded artist hand-sculpts her own version of the iconic teste di moro, crafts chandeliers with remnants of holy cards, reupholsters furniture with antique fabrics, reimagines Sicilian puppets using doll heads and lithographed tin boxes, and sews hammocks from traditional bedspreads. Her artistry extends to her ambitious restoration of a more than 1,000-year-old Arabic paper mill into a sanctuary for art and cultural events.

 

I recently had the opportunity to connect with Stefania, who shared her background, drive, process, and more.

 

You are originally from Bronte. How did that factor into your artistic journey?

I believe that growing up in a place where boredom is abundant gives creative minds the opportunity to explore various ways to fill time. Creating something from nothing or very little is one of these possibilities. I think that if I had grown up in a city and had been one of many children with days filled with pre-arranged activities by parents, like swimming, dance, or English lessons (just to name a few examples), I probably would have become something entirely different.

 

Your training is in physiotherapy; what influence has this had on your art?

I worked full-time for almost 20 years in neurorehabilitation, a branch of physiotherapy that exposed me to devastating, often dire illnesses and connected me with people with whom I formed deep bonds. The contact with their suffering and the opportunity to help them navigate their difficult days taught me a great deal and inevitably shaped my worldview. But at a certain point, I felt the need to give space to parts of myself that hadn't had the time to be "cultivated." That's where the choice to split my life between physiotherapy (which I still practice) and art came from. I would say that the creative part of me influenced my approach to physiotherapy, not the other way around!

 

Stefania Boemi
 

What drives your passion for sustainability in art, and how do you select materials?

Nowadays, there's a lot of talk about ecology, eco-art, "green" practices, and sustainability. These topics have become "trendy!" But for me, it's simply about love and admiration for the beauty of nature. These sentiments, if we can call them that, were inherited from my mother. I grew up in the countryside, and after a long pause living in the city four years ago, I chose to return to live amidst nature. It feels natural for me to be "sustainable" in everything I do. The materials I choose are either "repurposed" (like the bedspreads I use for hammocks, the crystals for my chandeliers, or the lithographs for my cushions) or sourced locally (like clay or sand from Mount Etna). The connection to the island is strong, omnipresent, and indispensable in both cases.

Stefania frequently repurposes vintage materials.

Tell us about your creative process.

Describing the creative process behind my pieces is quite difficult for me. In most cases, it's an instinctive spark. Once that spark ignites, the step to realization is immediate and materializes through a sequence of trials and errors—until exhaustion! I study the results and explore possible solutions. My hands are the instruments of my imagination, and controlling the material becomes both a pleasure and a surprise. When I recognize poetry in the achieved form, the creative process is complete for me.

 

Teste di moro reimagined by Stefania Boemi

How do you incorporate Sicily's culture and history into your work?

I think I achieve this through the choice of materials. Clay is Sicilian soil, and the teste di moro, with their legend, tell a piece of the island's history. The association and identification happen naturally, and in this case, obviously. Other pieces have more secret ties, perhaps less evident. They involve the reuse of materials/objects with a past story linked to local customs and habits. Our roots are important. They need to be preserved. They tell us who we are and our identity. They allow us to differentiate ourselves and maintain a world with millions of diverse peoples, each with their traditions, colors, customs, and habits. And that's simply wonderful. Imagine how boring the world would be if we were all the same!

Red teste di moro by Stefania Boemi

 

Are there any upcoming projects you are particularly excited about?

Yes, there are new projects on the horizon that also involve my current artistic production in some way. But the project is much broader. Four years ago, I fled the city and purchased an estate on the banks of the Simeto River. It includes the Arabic Paper Mill of Ricchisgia, a building dating back to the year 1,000. It was constructed by the Arabs during their domination of Sicily, with 26,000 square meters of land cultivated with pistachios and olives. The Paper Mill, after the Arabs left, was transformed into a convent and inhabited by the Benedictine and Basilian orders for about three centuries. The entire property was later donated to Count Nelson, who became the Duke of Bronte. It remained in his family's possession until the 1970s. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this little-known, secret place, which is part of an important minor historical heritage. It became my place in the world and my world. Here, I live and work surrounded by unspoiled nature, with rhythms and habits vastly different from those I previously had. I am personally involved in restoring and rehabilitating this extraordinary space. It's a complex project, challenging on many levels, especially financial. But it has become a life project. I'll host art and events. There's still much to do, but so much has already been accomplished. When I finish (if I ever do), I'll be able to say it was the most beautiful work I've ever done.

 

Medusa by Stefania Boemi

What advice would you give young artists?

I came across this writing by Rainer Maria Rilke, which encapsulates everything I could advise:

My daughter, if you feel a fire within,
a light burning deep inside,
don't smother it with the doubts of the world,
don't extinguish the fire with fear.
The path of the artist is long and uncertain,
but full of hidden treasures;
every brushstroke, every note, every word
is a step toward your truth.
Don't seek the approval of others,
don't expect applause at every step.
Art lives within you,
a silent song that only you can hear.
Create out of love, my daughter,
not for success or fame,
because true art is born from the heart,
not from the hands of those who judge.
You are young, and the world is vast,
full of dreams to paint,
of sounds to capture,
of stories to tell.
Be brave, and never stop searching,
because the artist never finds the journey's end,
but only new roads to explore,
new skies to paint with the stars.

Perseo and Andromeda by Stefania Boemi

What do you hope to share through your art?

In my view, art has the duty to evoke emotions. I hope to succeed in offering this—a small emotion.

 

 

Upcycled and reupholstered by Stefania Boemi

 

 

 

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Current archeological evidence suggests that humans first occupied Sicily around 17,000 years ago, which is far more recent than settlement to more remote places like Siberia or Australia. The question of why and how these early occupiers impacted Italy's largest island is at the heart of the Early Occupation of Sicily Project.

 

Led by Sicilian-born Washington University in St. Louis Assistant Archaeology Professor Ilaria Patania, alongside University of Connecticut Department of Anthropology Chair Professor Christian Tryon and a dedicated team of graduate students and alumni, the project seeks to answer questions about when humans first arrived in Sicily and their ecological impact.

 

Focusing on the region encompassing Syracuse and Ragusa, the Early Occupation of Sicily Project investigates why human settlement in Sicily lagged while examining whether early settlers influenced habitat changes and the extinction of species like tiny elephants and giant swans once found on the island.

The project combines geological mapping and underwater surveys to reconstruct ancient sea levels and migration routes. It has also gotten the local communities involved through citizen science initiatives focused on site preservation and research.

 

By exploring Sicily's archaeological past, researchers aim to connect historical migration patterns with today's climate-driven displacement issues. Perhaps it will also shed some light on solutions for our own future.

I recently spoke with Dr. Patania, who shared more about the project and her hopes for its outcome.

 

 

What inspired this project?

I've always done paleolithic archeology. I'm a geo-archeologist and an environmental archeologist by training. So, I'm really interested in how we can, as archeologists, contextualize. I'm less interested in what we produce and more in the environment we live in as humans, how we interact with it, and how we adapt to it. I have a very personal experience of traveling a lot and having to adapt to different places. I'm from a very warm place. I went to school in Boston, where it was very cold. And climate today is such a critical issue for everybody. My experience is that it impacts us no matter what. And it has impacted us.

 

One thing that I've also always been interested in is the very first wave of migrations of humans to a new place. It's not easy to arrive in a new landscape. How do they deal with it? What do they do? You need to know where water is, where food is, and what helped us because the reality is that we really moved a lot in a matter of a couple of hundreds of thousands of years. We colonized the entire planet, and we reached places that were almost unthinkable.

 

I think empathy is one of the things that allowed us to do this. The fact that other groups of Sapiens, Neanderthals, or Denisovans that were already on that landscape recognized their similarities with the newcomers. And they were able to help and guide us. And if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have been as successful at the very beginning.

 

Why are you studying southeastern Sicily in particular?

The reason why we're studying this area is more geological. This is an area on the African plate, not on the European plate, which means that tectonically speaking, it is quite stable, so there's no uprising of the coast. So, if you go to the north, all the coasts you see today are 80 to 160 meters higher than during the last glaciation, which means that where the first people arriving here walked is quite different from where it is today.

 

If you go to the southeastern portion, we have an uplift that goes between four and 12 meters, which is quite negligible. So we see something that was also seen by the first inhabitants, and it was pretty much in the same position. Of course, there was erosion and human impact, but more or less, we can reconstruct it.

 

Tell us about the time period you are researching and how Sicily looked.

This was a time period when the globe underwent glaciation. There's only a finite amount of water on Earth, and a lot of it is trapped in the ice caps, which means that the sea retreats during glaciations and comes back up. So, what is happening today with the rising sea levels? They're rising because the ice is melting, right? The opposite was true for the last glaciation, which was the time when the first humans arrived in Sicily. This means we are working on a landscape 100 meters to 120 meters farther offshore. These people had way more land to deal with to accommodate them.

 

Another piece of the puzzle is that because of that sea retreat, the island of Sicily was connected to the mainland of Italy, creating an actual land bridge, but also to the island of Malta, where there was another quite large bridge. Sicily was in the middle of this highway, which possibly brought people to Malta through Sicily. So that is one of the big questions: Did people come through Sicily and go to Malta? We are pretty sure that people came from Italy to Sicily.

 

At this point, the earliest homo sapiens in Northern Africa were from 300,000 years ago. Homo sapiens started coming out of Africa, traveling up the Levant. Eventually, they spread to places like Siberia 45,000 years ago.

 

Yet, there was nothing in the Mediterranean. At least they were getting their feet wet in that same sea and walking around that basin, yet they were not able to colonize the islands even if they could see them. And it might not be a matter of seafaring because between 65,000 and 45,000 years ago, we know that they could seafare the ocean because they arrived in Australia.

 

But they didn't seem able to colonize this basin. Most scholars agree that the reason why is the low trophic level and the strong and unpredictable currents of the Mediterranean.

So, the current hypothesis is that we cannot settle these landscapes unless we have the knowledge of goats and sheep, for example, if we bring them or grain with us and we start growing things. This seems to be true for most of the islands except Sicily—possibly because Sicily is so large—that if you have a small enough population, you might be able to survive.

 

Questions still open are: Did Sicily have such a small population that it took so long to really populate this island and colonize it? How long did it take us to move from one side to the other and eventually into Malta if we ever did that?

 

What impact did early humans have on Sicily's environment and vice-versa?

People think of humans in the past as being in tune with nature. In reality, that's not true. Humans are destructive at different degrees. Of course, our civilization today is one of the most destructive for the planet because of sheer numbers and the kind of technology we have that requires certain things. But we've always been like that. For example, when we arrived in pristine environments, we often hunted, killed off many animals, and eventually created a cascade effect and mass extinctions. So our questions are, did we do that in Sicily, and how did we do it?

 

Part of the work involves diving to find hidden evidence.

What methods have you used to trace human dispersal?

Our protocol has several steps. We start with archival work. This landscape hasn't really been studied a lot, scientifically speaking. This is a landscape where Greek and Roman archeology is way more popular and makes more money, touristically speaking. But that doesn't mean that local people are not interested in it.

 

There have been a few local vocational archeologists who have spent their entire lives after work and on their weekends walking this landscape. And a few of them actually did a great job of recording everything that they found. So we're going through all of the local publications, small historical bulletins in towns, et cetera, and trying to catalog as many of these finds from vocational archeologists as possible. Then we try to find them again, and we assess them in a very archeological way if we know that people have already excavated some sites. And we try to find the collections in the museums, and we analyze those.

 

We have found and analyzed two collections fully. During our foot surveys, we try to look at all of the caves that we find. So, while we relocate the other caves, we are also exploring new caves and trying to see if there's anything promising.

 

Underwater, we take a very similar approach. We start from the archival. We also do surveys. We walk the coast, swim or snorkel in certain areas, and dive in others.

 

We use a lot of citizen scientists. We have trained people to recognize stone tools and fossils. And so we ask every year we go back if they found anything. We have a reporting system in place for the underwater. This has worked particularly well.

 

What do you hope people take away from your research?

Archaeology is all about pretty objects like the Vase Museum. I don't think that's what archeology is. I think it's really about who we are as humans. 

 

I think empathy is a big part of our survival, especially when it comes to successful migrations, occupying new territories, and exploring new things. We, as a community, have accomplished a lot. We've always found a way to survive and go on. But at the same time, we've also very often destroyed the landscape around us, so we could learn from that.

A colleague the other day said something that really struck me: "We can't science ourselves out of this climate crisis, but we can definitely anthropology our way out."

 

Scientifically speaking, this climate crisis is indeed happening and is caused by humans. The issue, to me, is around how people react to this fact, and that is something we can look at through anthropology and archaeology.

 

We often forget the value of knowing our past and learning about it. I think the Paleolithic is a good place to start because it's stripped of the pretty flashy objects that often take attention away from the core issues. 

 

 

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