Belmond and Galleria Continua's MITICO project brings Pascale Marthine Tayou to Taormina

The MITICO project, a collaboration between luxury hotel group Belmond and Galleria Continua, has brought international artists to historic Belmond properties in Italy from spring to summer 2022. The project aims to reinterpret universal customs like cooking, painting, and observing through site-specific installations in hotel gardens. After earlier interventions by Subodh Gupta at Hotel Cipriani in Venice, Leandro Erlich at Villa San Michele in Florence, and Michelangelo Pistoletto at Castello di Casole, the final chapter features Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou at Grand Hotel Timeo in Taormina. Tayou created "Coloring the World," including "Les Routes du Paradis"—a path of color patches from the hotel entrance through the terraced garden to the 3rd-century Greek Theatre—and "Totem Cristal," human-sized crystal sculptures celebrating cultural creolization. The installations engage with the landscape's dry-stone walls, a UNESCO-recognized heritage element, transforming them into sculpture and painting. Lorenzo Fiaschi, co-founder of Galleria Continua, emphasized the gallery's history of bringing art outside conventional spaces. The project explores the relationship between humanity and nature, questioning how human intervention modifies landscape perception.