111 photographs, in black and white and color, almost all unpublished, taken in Catania in the nineties, tell the story of Ettore Sottsass ((Innsbruck, 1917-Milan, 2007) photographer, one of the lesser-known and investigated aspects of the great Italian architect and designer.

Curated by Barbara Radice with Iskra Grisogono and the artistic direction of Christoph Radl, the exhibition was inaugurated at the Museo Civico Castello Ursino in Catania on Sunday 20 November 2022. The exhibition was produced by the Fondazione OELLE Mediterraneo Antico in collaboration with the Studio Ettore Sottsass and in partnership with the Department of Tourism, Sport and Entertainment of the Municipality of Catania. The exhibition itinerary, conceived and created for the open space of the Castello Ursino, included 111 photographs, in black and white and color, almost all unpublished, taken by Ettore Sottsass in the nineties in Catania, a city for the which he has always had an interest and affection for. The photographs on display tell of a lively Catania: the baroque, the fish market, the streets, the scenes of daily life as frames of a history of the city.

Ettore Sottsass could be defined as a “photojournalist of life”. He began taking photos when he was a boy and has never stopped since. “I was horribly curious”, he himself declared. Photographing was a way of “stopping” life as well as a means of documenting it. The Studio Sottsass of Milan, the Sottsass Fund of the Centre George Pompidou in Paris and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky collaborated for the high definition of the negatives they preserve.