After the preview at the British Art Show 9 in Plymouth, the exhibition at Ordet in Milan as part of the larger exhibition on the artist's work, and the site-specific installation at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Dreaming Alcestis , the latest work by the award-winning French-English artist and director Beatrice Gibson , who has lived in Palermo for years, arrives at the Civic Museum of Castelbuono with an exhibition that opens on 23 April , finally entering the museum's permanent collection. The exhibition is accompanied by a public program that takes place between Castelbuono and Palermo from April to June 2023 , in collaboration with the University of Palermo , Nuova Orfeo , Sicilia Queer Film Festival and Spazioscena.

Co-directed with fellow director Nick Gordon and co-written with essayist and cultural theorist Maria Nadotti, Dreaming Alcestis evokes the protagonist of the ancient myth of Euripides as an ancestral guide, dreamily documenting the transfer of Gibson and Gordon from Gran Post-Brexit Brittany in the heart of the Mediterranean, in Sicily. Two characters, collectively dreaming of a long-dead queen (or perhaps being dreamed of by her), are shot in long sequences, as if in real time, holographically refracted, infused and interrupted by the sounds of the city and the sea. In the words of Beatrice Gibson, «2,500 years after his birth, Alcestis – in the film, a mysterious and Lynchian figure – returns from the underworld, dreaming, and dreamed herself by a man and a woman who traveled across Europe in search of him , from North to South, with the family in tow. Meanwhile, ice caps are melting, 43 wars are raging around the world, and another city is burning on TV."

The exhibition reinvents the work for permanent installation in the Museum.

The exhibition, curated by Laura Barreca, is accompanied by a public programme, curated by Beatrice Gibson and Maria Rosa Sossai, which includes conferences, seminars, theater workshops, performances, concerts, readings, games on Euripides' work Alcestis and on film reworking by Beatrice Gibson.

Drawing on the themes of the film, the Public Program foresees a shared reading of Euripides' text with the male and female students, the transcription of the tragedy in an art therapy laboratory with a final performance, a seminar on the moral responsibility of choice, an open debate on relevance of the figure of Alcestis seen from a feminist perspective, a journey into the afterlife imagined by the artist's children and a concert by the musicians who created the film's soundtrack.

Commissioned by the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (Palermo) and the Hayward Gallery Touring of the Southbank Center (London) for the British Art Show 9, Dreaming Alcestis is made possible thanks to the support of the Italian Council (X Edition 2021) , Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture . The film is produced by Okta Film , with support from ICONOCLAST and Somesuch .