A SICILIAN MYTH

Single-channel video, 1 min, colour, sound, 2023
Sound on!

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Anyone travelling through Sicily meets it everywhere: the Testa di Moro, a painted ceramic head that sits on balconies, in gardens and on restaurant tables, usually with basil growing out of it. Every souvenir shop sells it.

Behind it lies an old tale from Palermo, set around the year 1100 under Arab rule. A young woman tends the flowers on her balcony. A man walks by and the two fall in love. Then she learns that he has a wife and children at home and is going to leave her. During the night she kills him, cuts off his head and plants basil in it. The neighbours envy her the splendid plant and have pots made in the same shape. The motif has famous relatives: Judith and Holofernes in the Bible, and Lisabetta of Messina in Boccaccio's Decameron.

What unsettled me is how easily this violence passes as decoration today. In the video I translate that into a simple action: in front of oleander and sea I lift the ceramic head, smell the basil and let it fall. It shatters. Played in reverse, it returns intact to my hands, and everything begins again, faster and faster, until the single sound becomes a mechanical noise.

Repetition turns violence into rhythm and strips the act of all consequence. That is exactly what the souvenir has done to the legend. In the end the image stands still and the head is whole. Only the echo of the shattering goes on.

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“The past can be rewound, but what has happened cannot be undone.”

Ursula Meier on A Sicilian Myth. Read her full text in the exhibition catalogue Mythos – neu gedacht! Die SGBK zu Gast im Hans Erni Museum (Lucerne 2026), available at the Hans Erni Museum.

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Exhibitions
2026–27 Mythos – neu gedacht!, Hans Erni Museum, Lucerne
2023 Selected from 1,298 submissions for Mythology-Inspired, LoosenArt, Millepiani, Rome (not shown)