Studio Sicilia: Where Art meets Paper

What is Studio Sicilia?

Studio Sicilia is where Art meets Paper: in southern Sicily.

Sicily was a route for paper from Asia through the Arab world and into Europe during the late Medieval era. Many scholars believe it helped bring on the Renaissance.

In 2011-12 the studio is in Beta mode: a place to stay and work for creative people on a month-to-month basis, with a single bedroom and kitchen/laundry facilities. Any creative who works with paper – from designers to writers and artists – is eligible for a Creative Residency.

In April 2012 we are pleased to welcome Movana Chen, the first recipient of the Jerome Cox Sculpture Fellowship, for artists who work with paper as a sculptural medium. She will bring her Traveling To My Bookshelf project to Cianciana, and mystify residents as she knits paper books into art.

Summer 2012 has already been booked by a Hong Kong-based American artist, and we will feature his words and works once he arrives in Sicily.

Why paper?

Because as I pored through centuries of literature for my illustrated travel book on SE Asian papers (out in 2012) I discovered that much of the civilization we take for granted today – from literacy to democracy to the end of feudalism – is thanks to paper, its affordability, and the spread of ideas it enabled. And that most of all, now we have digital media for much of our everyday communication, paper can really come into its own. (Not to mention that it’s a perfect material for traveling artists.) I’m on a mission to encourage experiments with paper, and Studio Sicilia is part of my plan: here, creatives who work with paper will get the chance to hash out their ideas, have a paper library resource, and eventually, experienced papermakers will have the opportunity to make paper with local flora, from olive leaves to fennel to wildflowers.

Who can come to Studio Sicilia?

It's a Creative Residency program for artists in any discipline – designers, musicians, poets, writers, visual artists – who are looking for a space to work on their projects, and for whom Sicily can be an inspiration.

Where is it?

Studio Sicilia is located in the historic center of the atmospheric town of Cianciana (pop. ~3500) in southern Sicily, an hour's drive from the city of Agrigento and its famous Valley of the Temples by the sea.

Read more about Studio Sicilia and see its renovation progress here.

Explore some of Cianciana's stunning scenery here.