Vincenzo Consolo
Sciavolino’s olive trees

Such monuments as the beautiful fountain of Rivoli, the one of Collegno, dedicated to Peace, should be erected in every square in the cities and villages. Peace rallies have been held everywhere. The faded flags of peace still hang from the balconies of many cities. Because peace is always violated, always shattered by the war somewhere around the world. Peace, violated by war.
A war that is outrage, humiliation, death, destruction, savagery, barbarism. This has been taught by the great, since the antiquity. Homer first and foremost. In the Iliad, Homer tells of Thetis, the goddess, who goes and asks Ephestus for a shield for Achilles. In which he “portrayed the earth and the sky and the sea, and then the tireless sun and the full moon …Then he drew two thriving cities of mortal men.
In which are weddings and banquets …” This was the portrait of peace. But then war too is portrayed on the shield. On which are armed armies. And amidst them are “Contest and Tumult, and the evil goddess of Death”.
Therefore, the Odyssey is but a long and painful pilgrimage of the hero to atone for the sin of war. And the survivor, on arriving in Ithaca, dressed up as a beggar, sees that on the tip of the harbour, the olive tree, the hut, the faithful herdsman have disappeared. But it is the olive tree then, after the massacre of the Proci, that rises again in the bridal chamber to reunite Odysseus with Penelope, with Telemachus, to bring back peace. Far from the myth, from antiquity, entering our modern history, let’s say that in this Europe of ours the outrage of war is enclosed between the two Sarajevos. The Sarajevo that caused the First World War and the other one that caused the Second World War. One wanted by fascisms and Nazisms, this one that wanted the death camps, the genocides. But the outrage of war went on all through the twentieth century, the short century, as it was called, and the outrage goes on all through this third millennium. Wars have gone on in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Africa, in Israel and Palestine, in Lebanon…The war is still plaguing a land of ancient civilisation, Iraq, that land between two rivers where civilisation was born. The olive tree, the sacred tree of Athena, the goddess of Reason, seems to be still stifled, overwhelmed by the oleaster, the wild olive, the sign of regression, of a wild, violent nature. The olive of reason, of peace, of civilisation is the tree that prevails in Sciavolino’s works, the olive tree around which dance four children, the four points of the world, from whose branches some doves, the bearers of Peace, are about to fly off. From the branches of olive trees hung swings from which
children, children-angels, children as the hope of the world, rock backwards and forwards. We think Sciavolino belongs to the tradition of the great sculptors, mostly from Sicily, like the recent Francesco Messina and Emilio Greco. But we think in Sciavolino there is less of that romantic grace of those two sculptors, we think there is more poignancy, more power in what he wants his accent to be, what he wants his style to be in portraying this time of ours, this world of ours.