Glauco Canalis' work explores the boundaries between past and modernity, reconstructing a contemporary perspective on historical facts that have been mythologized through time. Sicily and the Mediterranean's history are key elements of his research.
He was born in Piazza Armerina, Sicily in 1990, after a BA Media Arts NABA in Milan he studied photography at Plymouth University.
Sicily’s strategic position at the center of the Mediterranean has favored the invasion of different powers aiming to exercise control on the Mediterranean across the centuries.
The most recent Military invasion of the region dates back to 1943, seeing the Allies powers landing in Sicily for the liberation from the Nazi-Fascist dictatorship.
Sicily today is home to a number of U.S. Military areas. Facilities and complex structures, contentiously embedded in a quiet and dry landscape that are ominously revealing the low profile of a silent activity.
The roots of these two far geographical and political powers are deepen in a common terrain, shadowed by the sinister power of Mafia.
The largely reported collaboration of Lucky Luciano with the U.S. Government, underlines the strong connection within U.S. Army and Sicilian Mafia.
Such fact, despite being shrouded in mystery and lore, finds further evidence in the political reconstruction campaign held by the AMGOT (Allied Military Governance of the Occupied Territories) that ultimately led to appoint 62 mafia mayors in the only province of Palermo.
As a result of such a political anomaly, a retrieved separatist ideology found its breeding ground to produce a heterogeneous movement asking for Sicily’s independence.
Taking advantage of the current affinity with the American Government the Separatist movement led the propaganda to annex Sicily as 49th State of America.
Aiming to re-define the American ubiquity between political and social realms as a contemporary political domain, this project investigates the U.S. Military presence in Sicily attempting to redefine the perception of such presence as that of the umpteenth emperorship superseded in Sicily’s history, as the Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Normans did beforehand.
