In Monastero, Pietro Motisi captures the architectural tension between ruin and renewal with surgical precision. A crumbling monastic wall, marked by time and weather, stands in silent dialogue with a newly constructed steel structure—transparent, modular, and rational. Motisi frames this juxtaposition without drama, allowing the materials themselves to tell a story of transformation, preservation, and friction.
Shot on large format film, the image emphasizes texture and light, rendering every crack in the plaster and grid of metal mesh with meditative clarity. This is not a nostalgic image, but a quietly critical one. Monastero poses questions: How do we build over memory? What remains sacred in an era of reconstruction?
Part of the CEMENTO series, this work is a reflection on Sicily’s layered identity—caught between the archaeological and the contemporary, the sacred and the bureaucratic, the enduring and the improvised.