“Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul: here lies the key to everything.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

MAGMA takes its name and inspiration from this intuition. Derived from the Greek μάγμα, meaning “dense mixture,” the term evokes a material in constant transformation – a condition that, in Sicily, coincides with the very idea of origin itself: a land generated by fire, layered by cultures, suspended between memory and the present.

Within this perspective, MAGMA emerges as a generative principle, an archè from which objects and narratives take shape.

The exhibition presents a selection of artist’s jewellery and objets d’art de la table by Roberto Aponte (1988), a designer and ceramic artist whose research explores the expressive potential of matter, extending its language from the object to the space itself. His practice unfolds in balance between industrial process and artistic experimentation and, through the collaboration with master goldsmith Matteo Bonafede, develops here into a profound dialogue between contemporaneity and Mediterranean memory.

The works draw inspiration from the mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, reinterpreted through forms and symbols that re-emerge like fragments of an ancient history.

Ceramics lie at the core of this research: composed of earth, water, and fire, they embody a profound temporal dimension that traverses the history of art up to the contemporary age. Throughout the twentieth century, artists and designers from Fausto Melotti to Lucio Fontana, and Giò Ponti, redefined its status, recognising its expressive and conceptual value. In continuity with the tradition of the artist’s jewel, Aponte reinterprets the material through industrial processes and experimental interventions, generating forms that are intentionally unstable and open to unpredictability.

Symbols such as the wheel, the sun, and the cymbala become sculptural elements, while the chromatic palette recalls the sensory geography of the island: the red of lava, the blue of the sea, and gold as a luminous echo of ancient mosaics.

The exhibition design takes shape as a contemporary symposium: a relational space in which art, design, and rituality inhabit the same formal and material universe. Ceramics and glazes, subjected to the unpredictable action of fire, generate unique and unrepeatable surfaces, making each piece a singular work.

Alongside necklaces, earrings, brooches, and rings, the exhibition also features tableware objects – plates, bowls, glasses, and candlesticks – extending the reflection toward a convivial and collective dimension.

In MAGMA, tradition is not quoted, but reactivated: memory becomes living matter and project.

Completing the exhibition project is the site-specific intervention by Francesco Bustreo (1999), fashion and textile designer. His embroidered organza panels, evoking the Sicilian landscape, together with the textile elements conceived for the table, create a unified environment, amplifying the immersive dimension of the exhibition and guiding visitors through a sensory and narrative experience.

In MAGMA, forms do not merely reference the past: they reactivate it.

Jewellery and objects emerge as living presences, in which memory becomes matter and matter becomes language. It is precisely in this passage – from origin to transformation – that tradition ceases to be inheritance and asserts itself as a projectual act.