We are the Cretto
A Text by Nicolò Stabile
WHAT IS THE CRETTO?
The Grande Cretto di Gibellina by Alberto Burri is one of the largest works of art in the world and measures 270 x 310 metres. Like a shroud of white concrete, it covers the ruins of the small village that was destroyed by the earthquake on 15 January 1968. In the centre of western Sicily, in a region with a rich cultural heritage, it stands in timeless dialogue with the imposing columns of the Greek Selinunte further south and the sublime solitude of the temple of Segesta, an ancient city of the Elymians in the north.
The Cretto by Alberto Burri was built from the stones and things that once formed Gibellina: streets, squares, houses, stables, shops, workshops, schools, churches, an Italian-style theatre and a 14th century castle. The Cretto is the tomb and the lost home of a small village in the south of Italy. It reconstructs ideal, spatial and temporal paths between memory and the present, between the living and the dead.
It is a work that defies any attempt at categorisation.
A CALL TO THE ARTS
Its history is complex. It began in 1979 and is still ongoing today. It had a deus ex machina: Ludovico Corrao, mayor of Gibellina from 1970 to 1994, who—like Fitzcarraldo—knew that dreams can move mountains.
We are at the end of the 1970s. For the citizens of Gibellina who survived the earthquake, the trauma continued: they had to live in temporary shelters for more than a decade—icy in winter and scorching hot in summer. New town centres were beginning to take shape according to state plans—some of them, like Gibellina Nuova, far away from the old settlements. These plans were drawn up in an office in the distant capital of Rome by a handful of urban planners who believed—as they wrote in the project report—that they could fight the mafia by building wide streets to separate the inhabitants from each other. The concerns and needs of the local communities were ignored. Furthermore, the municipalities were deprived of any decision-making power by law.
Ludovico Corrao was powerless in the face of the urban planning decisions imposed by the state. However, he was aware of the ignorance of these plans and was convinced that houses alone were not enough to restore a sense of community and solidarity. He knew that reconstruction must be given greater meaning, with beauty acting as a driving force and unifying element. That is why he brought together artists, intellectuals and cultural workers to try to make the city more beautiful.
The writer Leonardo Sciascia wrote in a speech he gave in Gibellina on 15 January 1988 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the earthquake: “The Italian state—it must be said—was neither willing nor inclined to accept a demand for reconstruction that was more than just a restoration of misery: perhaps they were actually hoping for escape, for abandonment, for the desire to start anew somewhere else; and the proof of this is that the ‘two per cent law’, the law providing for two per cent of expenditure on artistic designs for public buildings, was suspended and repealed for the reconstruction of these cities. A ban on art, a ban on beauty: it’s as if they wanted everything to be uglier than before, so that people wouldn’t recognise each other or their homeland. Whether intentional, an unconscious desire or simply the lack of even a vague idea among the ruling class of what beautifies and strengthens life—here in this region this has become evident on several occasions; but in Gibellina it has found a place of resistance. [Ludovico Corrao] has shown that life is not elsewhere, but that it can also be here.”
Artists responded to Corrao’s call and the new Gibellina came to life through art. At the end of the 1970s, Gibellina became a permanent laboratory of the arts, a meeting place for artists and an open-air museum.
A MASTERPIECE EMERGES FROM THE RUINS
Corrao even managed to persuade the artist Alberto Burri, who is considered a difficult personality, to come to Gibellina. In 1979, Burri travelled from Rome with all his prejudices about the south of Italy and its inhabitants. The new city did not inspire him, and the idea of leaving behind a piece alongside those of artists he did not appreciate did not appeal to him: “I certainly won’t do anything here.” But then he visited the ruins of Gibellina, which had been destroyed by the earthquake. He must have sensed the silence, interrupted only by the cawing of crows in this hilly landscape that stretches all the way to the African Sea, and he was almost moved. The idea came to him that very evening: “I would do it like this: we compact the rubble, which is a problem for you anyway, fix it properly, and with concrete we create a huge white cretto (crack) so that this event will be remembered forever.”
In order to create the work, Burri dreamed of the active and energetic participation of the residents of Gibellina. It was only much later that he learnt—and it made him very sad—that many not only didn’t like the Cretto, but perceived it as a form of violence.
A DIFFICULT REALISATION
Corrao used countless ideas and strategies to procure funds, materials and labour. It was unthinkable to ask the state for funding. In 1985, the work began to take shape and spread out among the rubble. Burri left it to the technicians and workers to find solutions to implement his recommendations. He followed the project from afar via his friend Alberto Zanmatti, the architect on site.
On the morning of 23 May 1987, Burri saw his Cretto for the first and last time: he seemed disappointed and said almost nothing. He probably missed the view from above, to which he had become accustomed thanks to the model he had worked on. Despite the size, he missed the feeling of grandeur that he had imagined. The visit only lasted a few hours, just enough to take a photo of the artist’s encounter with his work.
In 1989, when 70 per cent of the work had been completed, the work on the Cretto was stopped due to a lack of funds. Corrao managed to obtain funding from the Sicilian region by submitting the project not as a work of art but as a “city park”. But there was no time left for him to set the bureaucratic machinery in motion. After more than twenty years, the people of Gibellina no longer wanted him as mayor, and in 1994 Corrao was not re-elected. His successor managed to lose this funding on purpose, and from then on the Cretto was gradually abandoned.
Years passed and white turned grey. The metal beneath the surface had rusted, causing parts of the concrete to break off. There were a few small collapses, chips and cracks. Apart from a few cleanings to remove the vegetation that had begun to overgrow the work, no maintenance was carried out. Nobody came to the ruins any more. The opportunities to gather there were becoming increasingly rare. The Cretto was almost forgotten. Burri didn’t like to talk about it either. As he had predicted, he died in 1997 without seeing his work completed.
Then a wind farm was built on the surrounding hills, where a few years previously there had been young forests. The municipality deemed it necessary to create a car park and built it in the immediate vicinity of Alberto Burri’s work using the same white concrete: from a distance, it looks like a metastasis of Cretto‘s square body. The same material was used to resurface the stretch of provincial road that runs along one side of the Cretto, disfiguring its shape. There was no outcry over these crude public interventions that disfigured Burri’s idea. Institutional vandalism.
THE CRETTO IS ALIVE
The idea of launching an appeal to save the Cretto came to me one summer afternoon in 2010 when I was talking to Ludovico Corrao. He was already seriously ill, but by no means resigned.
However, the fact of not seeing the Cretto completed made him deeply sad. The appeal was signed by around one hundred personalities from the worlds of art and culture and sent to the responsible minister and the regional council. Less than two months later, in a joint statement from the Ministry, the Secretary of State and the Regional Assessor emphasised that the appeal would not go unheeded. The Ministry provided funds from lottery proceeds for the restoration.
However, the region hesitated on the issue of completion and the assessor urged the involvement of private investors. Then, on 7 August 2011, in a fatal twist reminiscent of a Greek tragedy, Ludovico Corrao was murdered by his carer. Three days later, as we were paying our last respects to Senator Corrao on the forecourt of the Chiesa Madre of Gibellina, Assessor Sebastiano Missineo took me aside and, overcome with emotion, said that he would find the necessary funds to complete the work—he owed it to Corrao’s memory. He kept his promise.
Work on the Cretto was completed in 2015. The new snow-white part was just as Burri had imagined it, but made the old grey part of the Cretto stand out even more, creating a striking contrast. What should be done to ensure its preservation for posterity? How can the old and new parts be harmonised? It was clear from the outset that maintaining this extraordinary work would require an equally extraordinary approach.
Burri would have liked the community of Gibellina to create the work themselves. After all, his work was donated to the community. Although they lost their property and their claim to it through the forced expropriation of their houses, which no longer exist, they are the moral owners and therefore guardians of the Cretto. It was also on this basis that, together with Corrao, it was decided that the Cretto should be regularly cleaned and painted with lime by the community. Lime is a simple, sanitising material that is easy to use and follows a tradition throughout the Mediterranean. This seemed to be the only way forward.
The Cretto must not die, but neither can it turn into a black hole of public money. Rather, it should become a common cultural asset that attracts travellers and, if well managed, brings economic benefits through targeted measures that ensure its promotion and visibility.
But the real key to securing the future of the Cretto lies in the relationship between the site of the ruins and the people. They initially experienced the Cretto as a foreign body, as an act of violence against the ruins, which in their modest physical presence nevertheless evoked a deep emotional connection. The initial rejection of this work had increased the physical distance (18 kilometres) between the new and the old Gibellina, a distance that has grown even further due to the indifference towards a half-finished work.
The need for a participatory restoration, initiated by the community, arises first of all from the need to establish a new relationship with Burri’s work and with the whole site of the ruins. This need should form the basis for further planning and realisation. First and foremost, the restoration should provide an opportunity for a festive and ritualistic moment in which the population reclaims the site and the symbols associated with it. The restoration should not only be economically sustainable, but also be able to generate economic activity and thus bring direct benefits. It must also ensure that Burri’s idea remains constantly visible in its original and fundamental colourfulness. For the people of Gibellina, this would be a way to break the spell of human nostalgia: the spell of a past time idealised by the tragic event of the earthquake and the events that followed, to accept the present moment and begin to invest in the future.
A restoration of all the existing works in Gibellina Nuova should also be carried out in a way that involves the numerous artists. Many have already signalled their willingness to participate.
In recent years, I have had the opportunity to share this idea with restorers, experts in materials of contemporary art, art historians, curators, artists, musicians and performers. With people who were the closest to Alberto Burri during the years in which the Cretto was built and who worked with him, as well as with the residents of Gibellina. And also with the decision makers at the relevant institutions, Gibellina Town Hall and the Trapani Superintendence for the Protection of Monuments. With the exception of the latter, who are still in favour of conservational restoration, everyone has welcomed the idea and its deeper meaning with enthusiasm.
Corrao’s project, epitomised by Gibellina and exemplified in Burri’s Cretto, is based on the Mediterranean idea that beauty regenerates. It is also based on the need to reactivate the fundamental myths of our civilisation by reviving them. The participatory restoration would mark the transition from utopia to the present, and the Cretto would ultimately become the Gesamtkunstwerk that Burri dreamed of.
THE CRETTO IS MY HOME
We have asked the women and men who preserve the memory of the old Gibellina under the Cretto to return to the place where they were born and grew up. This is an opportunity to rediscover themselves in a ritual in which the population reclaims the place and the symbols associated with it.
Everyone bravely poses for a photo in the exact place where his/her life in Gibellina Vecchia ended and says: “This is my home.”
The participatory photo project, a selection of which will be shown in the exhibition, is intended to help keep Burri’s idea constantly visible in its power. Perhaps the Cretto will fully become the Gesamtkunstwerk that Burri envisioned by “activating” itself with its community.
One more small step to accompany Il Grande Cretto by Alberto Burri from the utopia from which it originates to our present as a marvellous reality.
Nicolò Stabile
Gibellina, August 2024
