Ten years after the passing of Pinuccio Sciola on May 13, 2016, Sardinia continues to pay homage to one of its most internationally recognized artists, capable of transforming stone into a universal language, a dialogue between peoples, public art, and sound experimentation.
For its tenth anniversary, the Pinuccio Sciola Foundation has promoted a comprehensive program of cultural, artistic, and charitable initiatives that will run through 2026. The goal is to showcase not only the artistic legacy of the master from San Sperate, but also his contemporary vision of international connections, innovation, and inclusion. But this is a work in progress, as new proposals are added daily, in a whirlwind that only his genius and intuition could generate, and which continues to create relentlessly.
At the heart of the celebrations will be the Sant'Arte Festival 2026, scheduled for May 29th to 31st at the Giardino Sonoro in San Sperate, a symbolic location for Sciola's work. This year's festival, which revolves around the theme "Urban Connections," will bring together art, music, science, architecture, and new technologies in an open dialogue between disciplines and cultures.
"Here we celebrate Saint Art every day, without a specific reason or date," Pinuccio Sciola used to say. "The sense of beauty has become a common conscience, to be preserved and venerated. Now it's a matter of infecting the whole of Sardinia, and making art a sort of festivity, to be celebrated at any time."
Three days of debates, music, and art, starting with the extraordinary reopening of his home at Via Marongiu 21 in San Sperate, which Sciola transformed into a sort of literary salon, where he could meet and engage with other artists, university professors, and politicians, forging new connections every day. A plate of ravioli—cooked to perfection by the maestro—became a pretext for conversations about art, life, and the world. Sciola was a man capable of bridging distances and differences: he shared the same passion with a young farmer and a Nobel Prize winner. Connections with Japan will also be evident, following the extraordinary success of the sounding stones at Expo Osaka 2025.
Alongside the cultural events, there's also space for solidarity. On June 6th, the Giardino Sonoro will host a benefit event sponsored by the Rotary Club in support of the Cagliari Hospice. The initiative will feature artists, musicians, and intellectuals connected to Sardinian culture, with the goal of raising funds to purchase infusion pumps for palliative care.
The tenth anniversary program also includes photography exhibitions, tours dedicated to Sciola's artistic legacy, and activities to enhance the cultural heritage preserved in the Sound Garden and the artist's House Museum, now the focus of a broader project of restoration and international outreach.
One of the most significant events of 2026 is precisely on the international front: the exhibition dedicated to Pinuccio Sciola at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, scheduled for September. The exhibition will bring to the French capital a selection of works and content dedicated to the Sounding Stones, a symbol of Sciola's artistic research and his ability to transform matter into a sensorial experience.
The Parisian initiative represents a further step in the Foundation's internationalization journey, already engaged in collaborations with European museums, universities, and cultural institutions to spread Sciola's artistic and human message beyond the borders of Sardinia.
Ten years after his death, Pinuccio Sciola's work continues to speak to the present: a living cultural heritage, still capable of generating encounters, relationships, and new visions of the future.
For the tenth anniversary, the "DEXI" logo was also designed, a distinctive symbol for all initiatives dedicated to Pinuccio Sciola. At the center is a stylized X taken from one of his works: not just a simple graphic element, but a living trace of the artist's gesture and material, a symbol of the encounter between memory and future.
Next to the X, the word “dexi” – ten in the Sardinian language – recalls an intimate and identifying dimension, linked to the peasant origins and the universal value of the mark left by man on his own territory.
The logo thus represents not only the conclusion of a cycle, but also the continuity of a cultural legacy still capable of generating relationships, creativity, and new connections, just as happens in Pinuccio Sciola's Pietre Sonore.
“When I was not and there was no time, when chaos dominated the universe, when incandescent magma oozed the mystery of my formation, since then my time has been locked in a very hard crust. I have lived through endless geological eras, immense cataclysms have shaken my lithic memory. I carry with emotion the first signs of human civilization. My time is timeless” (Pinuccio Sciola).
