Traces of Games on Ancient Stones

Canicattì, Riesi, Campobello di Licata, Forza d’Agrò, Petralia Sottana, Pollina, Palermo.

There are no adults. Or almost none. In Ezio Ferreri’s photographs there are only the picciriddri, the children, and the ancient stones.

These are the 1970s and 1980s, in Sicily’s inland villages and among the ruins of Palermo. The children turn everything into play: a pile of stones becomes a castle, a railing a fairground ride, a crooked alley a football pitch, a vacant plot strewn with rubble the centre of the world.

It is serious, stubborn play. A form of resistance.

As Giosuè Calaciura writes in the critical essay accompanying the work, ruins and picciriddri share the same curse and the same possibility. They are ancient, resigned traces of vanished civilisations, but also the writing of a new, lawless life, unlike anything before. No one has managed to decipher the hieroglyph etched by the cracks; no one has been able to follow the line of destiny on the palm of a child’s hand.

In Ferreri’s photographs the adults are absent. They belong to another dimension. What remains are the stones, which are memory, and the children, who are the future. And between them, the light trace of a game that refuses to disappear.