PANTÀLICA TOTEM by NICOLÒ SPINELLI

The Pantàlica series by Spinelli draws inspiration from the necropolis of Pantàlica in southeastern Sicily, a vast natural and archaeological site where thousands of rock-cut tombs hewn into limestone cliffs—a vast natural and archaeological palimpsest where human history and geological time converge. Capturing a sense of both staggering monumentality and tender intimacy, The collection transforms this wondrous and haunting landscape into sculptural furniture works that are at once functional and architectural

Solid timber, dyed a deep black, becomes the medium through which the primal monumental character of Pantalica is reimagined. Surfaces are manually brutalized through planing and irregular carving, echoing the raw, time-worn presence of rock shaped by both erosion and human intervention. The resulting forms are not polished into submission but retain the marks of their making, carrying forward the traces of labor and touch

At the heart of each work lies an excavation: voids carved into the wood as an abstracted memory of the caves and tombs of Pantalica. These are not random gestures but deliberate geometries, where rational order emerges through repetition and serial patterning. Negative space becomes as charged as mass, evoking the silent interiors of the necropolis where shadow, light, and absence resonate

The spirit of the series is illuminated by Vincenzo Consolo’s reflection in Le Pietre di Pantalica: “There is always a shadow that appears behind a ruin stone between a tree and a dirt column. There is always a voice that wants to tell: ‘Look, the world was all this, stop and listen, it won’t last much longer, see, it has already disappeared’”

Handcrafted in Italy, Spinelli’s Pantàlica becomes an elegy and a meditation, at once austere and imaginative, rooted in history yet alive with possibility