Alfio Puglisi in conversation with podcast host Sarah Rhodes on how the Sicily Artist in Residence Program (SARP) is transforming Sicily into a global hub for contemporary art through site-specific residencies, local collaboration, and atmospheric place-making.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Sarah Rhodes speaks with the podcast’s co-producer Alfio Puglisi — founder of the Sicily Artist in Residence Program (SARP) — about returning to his ancestral home on the slopes of Mount Etna to forge a new vision for contemporary art in Sicily. Alfio shares his remarkable journey: from studying economics and the digital economy and society at King’s College London to teaching in Lisbon, and ultimately leaving behind a secure academic career to pursue something more entrepreneurial and creatively rooted. That shift led him back to Linguaglossa, where he transformed his family’s 17th-century palazzo into a living museum, restaurant, contemporary gallery and residency program.

Through SARP, Alfio brings together international and local artists, offering them space, support, and time to develop site-responsive work. The program emphasises collaboration with local artisans, curators, and Sicilian production facilities, ensuring that exhibitions are deeply embedded in place. These are not parachute residencies, but long-form engagements that invite artists to slow down, adapt, and attune to Sicily’s layered histories and landscapes.

Together, they discuss:

• The personal and political significance of returning home to begin again


• Why Sicily’s “peripheral” location may actually be a place of focus and clarity for artists


• The interplay between cultural memory, atmospheric conditions, and contemporary creative practice


• The red Saharan rain that settles each spring on Sicilian gardens — and how this meteorological phenomenon became the digital pigment for new photographic work by Andre Hemer


• How Alfio’s vision for SARP builds on both inherited history and future-facing cultural networks


• The growing community of creatives — many returning from cities like London, Paris, and Berlin — who are reshaping Sicily’s role in the international art conversation

This episode offers a meditation on place, return and reinvention. As Alfio says, Sicily’s position at the centre of the Mediterranean offers not just geography, but perspective — a place to think, to feel, and to make without distraction.

Listen in as we reflect on the links between atmosphere and art-making, the value of community and continuity, and how peripheral places can become sites of deep cultural transformation.