A Story in Time - From Earth to Sky
Interview in Public Art and Ecology by John K. Grande
Born in Milo (Etna), Sicily in 1947. In the early 1950's his family immigrated to Australia, where he studied painting. In 1965 he returned to Sicily. After working six years in Rome, Bonanno moved to the Island of Langeland in Denmark in 1975. A pioneer of environmental art and a representative of the European development of Land Art or Art in Nature, Alio Bonanno is a site-specific, outdoor installation artist who has been creating large-scale sculptures within selected, natural environments for the past 35 years. The symbiosis between art, nature and ecology is an important aspect of his work, as is his role as artist, consultant and lecturer. In 1985 his Sound Year Installation at the Miró Museum in Barcelona, Spain, a collaboration with Danish composer Gunner Møller Pedersen, was seen as a breakthrough in environmental art. Miró Museum produced a film of the Sound Year Project. It was on his initiative and with him as chairman that TICKON, Tranekær International Centre for Art and Nature was created on the Danish Island of Langeland in 1990. In 2004 he created Himmelhøj, a sculpture landscape containing four major site specific works. In 2000 Lars R. Jensen and Torben K. Madsen with support from the Danish Film Institute and Danish Video workshop produced "Fragments of a Life", a 45 min. documentary film on Alfio Bonanno and his work. This Film has been shown on Danish National Television and at Film Festivals in Denmark (where it was awarded a prize), in Germany and at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC, USA. In 2005 he was awarded Hydro Texaco`s "Friend of the Tree" Prize. In June 2006, Alfio Bonanno was awarded on behalf of the Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, The Order OSSI, Ordine della Stella della Solidarietá Italiana. Since the late 1970's he has worked in many countries with and in natural and urban landscapes with site specific projects both with large structures of natures own materials and with conceptual acts.
Read the full interview here (PDF-file, 16 pages, 7 MB).