Piramide – 38° parallelo, 2010

corten steel, 30.000×22.000 cm
Fondazione Fiumara d’Arte, Motta d’Affermo, Messina, Italy

21 March 2010, the spring equinox, the Piramide – 38° parallelo (38th Parallel Pyramid) was inaugurated in Motta d’Affermo (Messina), commissioned upon the desire of Antonio Presti for his now historic Fiumara d’Arte foundation.
The imposing Piramide – 38° parallelo is named after its location on a plateau in the vicinity of Motta d’Affermo overlooking the sea and the Eolian islands with the archaeological excavation of the ancient city of Halaesa in the background. 30 metres high, it has a triangular base since, as Staccioli states, ‘The triangle is the three-pointed image whose vertexes I imagine to be Art, Religion and Philosophy. It is Sicily… I was interested in creating a place at once universal and particular, where man can stop to reflect upon the meaning of existence: a question without an answer, perhaps, but tangible, a secular place for reflection upon being and being-in-the-world today.’
The structure of the Piramide, a hollow tetrahedron, is made out of hundreds of corten steel plates: a material that oxidises in contact with the air to assume an intense brown colour. At sunset the setting sun’s rays give the brown steel a red light which penetrates the inside of the sculpture through a cut in the edge facing north-west, towards Cefalù. The centre of the Piramide is completed by some ancient ‘ferrous’ stones, smoothed by the sea before the waters withdrew from the plateau, found during excavations and put back together to make a spiral inside the work.

Designer: architetto Angelo Pettineo
Project management and Calculations: Marcello Arici e Salvatore Serio
Impresa Zetazo di Zambito di Vicari e Impresa Bruno Paolo di Pettineo