Daniela Ortiz, winner of the OELLE – Ancient Mediterranean Prize, as part of ARTISSIMA 2024, presents Miracolo, an exhibition born from the artistic residency in Sicily promoted by the Foundation. Inspired by the tradition of votive offerings from the Sanctuary of the Holy Martyrs Alfio, Filadelfo, and Cirino in Trecastagni, Ortiz creates a highly timely visual narrative that spans anti-colonial resistance and historical anti-fascism, reaching to the current plight of the Palestinian population. The works, spanning painting, video, and sculpture, rewrite official narratives, transforming symbols of oppression into instruments of liberation. The works bring together historical episodes of resistance against Italian colonial occupation in Africa between the 1920s and 1945—from the Ethiopian victory at Anchem to the resistance in Kufra, to the battles in Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya—to bring to light a different story from the official versions that often ignore local struggles. At the same time, Ortiz intertwines these memories with the contemporary Palestinian situation, showing how the present recalls the resistance of yesterday.​

​

"Daniela Ortiz," says Ornella Laneri, president of the OELLE Foundation, "has the rare ability to artistically decipher world political events. At the end of her residency in Sicily, she reinterpreted ex-votos, uniting them in a common thread that generated a project — Miracle — which represents an important part of the foundation's evolutionary journey through artistic cross-fertilization.

 

Miracle is an invitation to reflection: a call not to accept the stories we've been told, but to question them, to give voice to suppressed memories, to transform representation into action. The votive images Ortiz proposes bring into play historical memory, but also the responsibility of the present and the possibility of constructing alternative narratives.

 

A central part of the exhibition is a sculpture combined with a video documenting the transformation of a fascist weapon into a scythe: a powerful metaphor for the reversal of meaning, from an instrument of oppression to a symbol of work, care, and liberation.