Market. in our Secret Mag Club in April

Telling Sicily without falling into clichés is not easy. Whether it is to enhance its beauties or to revive the aspects that muddy its name and stories, when it comes to Sicily making stereotyped mental associations is all too simple. But thinking by stereotypes means staying on the surface of things and we, accustomed to reading niche magazines, tend to avoid simplification to marry a deeper and more in-depth look at the world. 

Market, the magazine we have selected for the Secret Mag Club of April, shows us that another perspective of Sicily (and territorial magazines!) is possible. Halfway between a magazine and a photobook, Suq. Unconventional Sicily, tells us about a land that seems alien as far as it is from the common-place-sicily we have in our mind. Born in 2017 by a group of creatives and travelers who one day decided to start exploring the unconventional heritage of the island, among its pages we find "beauty, territory, culture. The tangible and intangible elements, the symbols, the stories, the contracts, the dreams, the hopes. We dig underground because we are interested in what is unexplored, underground, in the shadow. The gaze on diversity and authenticity", As its founders tell us.
But do not expect the classic territorial magazine, what you will not find in the pages of Suq is the Sicily of holidays and tourism, advice on what to do and where to eat, the Baroque and Norman cities. 

Place to be and travel tips, to put it in a language that is as popular as it is poor, they give way to the unusual and emotion. Thus it happens, for example, that the skeletons of the ghost houses of Pizzo Sella, a black spot of building speculation on a paradisiacal Palermo, are shown to us, if not just mentioned, while we talk about slacklining and tightrope walkers who inhabit the sky suspended between the peaks in Palermo, or that a visit to a "monstrous" Grotta Monello becomes a pretext to remind us how harmful the presence of man can be.

Not at home this sixth issue of Suq opens with a text by Leonardo Caffo that reminds us how misleading talking about the anthropocene is because "the planet, of humanity, doesn't care", Existed without us and will continue to exist even when Sicily is desert and salt water.

Then we go to visit a permaculture company in Paternò to find ourselves projected into a habitat that is Sicily, but it could be Brazil or Cambodia: Saja is called, like the irrigation canal that feeds the land, a word that from Arabic means flow, as a reminder that even when we are not there, the channel - and life - will continue to flow.

The issue closes with a visit to an old printing house in Catania that once printed the Sicilian tarots which, it turns out, more than to read the future are used as playing cards, as if the future in this corner of the earth was already written , marked, immutable.

At the end of the reading, this issue of Suq leaves a feeling of helplessness in the face of the majesty of nature, but above all leaves the visceral desire to visit a Sicily that appears exotic and wonderful to our eyes, thanks to the words and poetic photographs that accompany the texts. .

This magazine, unconventional from many points of view, also shows us that it is possible to make a territorial magazine that is at the same time universal, because such are the topics that emerge from its pages. In short, Suq is a concrete and original example that we recommend to follow to the many who approach to tell their territory on paper and we also love it for the words they leave us in their manifesto:

“We continue to bet on paper to recover the lost quality of physical things that smell of truth”.

Find Suq magazine available on Frab's WHO