Gli Osservatori | Mauro Cappotto
curated by Gianluca Collica

An observatory is a radar, a stage, a shelter, a promontory, a penultimate position, a chance. It is the point from which a perspective is boldly drawn. A pulpit, a springboard, a ladder, a flight without a parachute, an infinite line. Above all, it is a space for meditation. A truce.
During his many journeys to Berlin, Mauro Cappotto documented numerous observatories, drawing and photographing them with a certain obsessive persistence. They were proud, austere structures positioned against the Wall, designed to project one’s gaze beyond it. Even the sky seemed divided in two; even the gaze became doubled along the austere scar of concrete. From East Berlin, one could glimpse the life of West Berlin, and vice versa. All it took was to climb onto those elevated platforms, now long disappeared.
This is the leitmotif of Cappotto’s solo exhibition at the Fondazione Brodbeck in Catania, presented within the cultural programme Unfinished Culture, curated by Giovanni Iovane, with Gianluca Collica as artistic director.
In this particular case, the exhibition documents a nocturnal intervention along the seafront of Capo d’Orlando (Messina), where “Mauro Cappotto’s Observatory” is erected: a gaze projected beyond the horizon, towards a sea gathering into a storm, jealous of its own mysteries and poised to erase every attempt at disclosure. The storm eventually arrives and, the following day, swallows the observatory forever, transforming this act of observation into an ephemeral trace suspended between appearance and disappearance.