Palermoscape. Sulla pelle della città
2024-2025

Describing a city therefore means undertaking a journey through time and space.

Scotti's photographs have captured the idea of the city as a significant environment, sensing the need for art to return to the squares, streets, alleys, and spaces of real life.

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Hence, there is a political vision in Scotti's gaze that is evident both in some of his previous works, angry, very angry ones, such as Cinneman Heart (2016-2019) and Innobiliare Sud Ovest (2020-2023), and in the shots of this recent Sicilian adventure. A political perspective on the present day, not intended as propaganda or as an easy shortcut to gain visibility, but, in the etymological sense of the term, as interest in “public affairs”. A point of view that I like to think of as being in continuity with that lifeblood that since the early decades of the 20th century believed in a poetics in which art had the task of dealing with the open questions of society.

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Giovanni's eye, like that of an anthropologist, highlights both the renewed/rediscovered irruption of the sacred, through art, in everyday life and the non-stereotypical image of the Sicilian capital as a city crossed by a strong and fervent sense of religiosity. [...] His gaze, which is appreciably sensitive, triggers an interesting short circuit in the spectator, overturning the deep-rooted certainty that our years are characterized by an absence of the sacred, and instead restoring a portrait of Palermo as a city that, perhaps, we already knew but had never carefully reflected upon.

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Gabriella De Marco

Art historian​​

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Excerpt from the critical text "Palermo between space and narrative in the photography of Giovanni Scotti", in the book SULLA PELLE DELLA CITTÀ. Street art e Nuovo muralismo a Palermo (ON THE CITY’S SKIN. Street Art and New Muralism in Palermo), Edifir, 2025

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If the tool for documenting the exploration of the urban surface is necessarily photography, the interpretative key necessary to make it an expression of art-based research derives from the critical eye of an artist who is used to looking with his own eyes before capturing what he sees with a camera lens.

Thus, guiding the investigation, alley by alley, in Old Palermo, is the artistic talent of an urban photographer well-accustomed to continuously adapting his intentions to what emerges from the places he visits.

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Giovanni Scotti's work therefore seems to be an ideal take to cast a glance over Old Palermo, capturing the urban voids and the abundance of ruins that both Street Art and New Muralism have been able to emphasize in recent years. If the urban context in Southern Italy is certainly suited to the Neapolitan photographer, the need to interpret someone else's artistic work is on the other hand a very sensitive challenge. To face this challenge, as already explained in the previous chapters, Scotti decided to use two cameras, a digital one for the panoramas and a Fujifilm instant camera for the wall details. This second technique is particularly intended to be at once metaphorical and poetic, managing to capture and transpose the intrinsically ephemeral character of spontaneity in Street Art, that is to say, the kind destined to disappear due to the crumbling of the wall support or the superimposition of subsequent visual contributions. The single shot in Fujifilm, therefore, is motivated by the desire to respect the transience and uniqueness of the subject represented which, as with all pictorial works, is created in a more or less perishable unit. In the same way, the photographic medium of the snapshot already represents the single resulting photographic unit, with all the risks involved regarding the correct immediate development and the durability of the shot over time.

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Diego Mantoan

Contemporary art historian and economist​

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Excerpt from the text "A critical eye", in the book SULLA PELLE DELLA CITTÀ. Street art e Nuovo muralismo a Palermo (ON THE CITY’S SKIN. Street Art and New Muralism in Palermo), Edifir, 2025