Petra Noordkamp

Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina, 2015
Film, 14 min
Courtesy Petra Noordkamp and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Petra Noordkamp is an artist. She works with photography and film and explores the influence of experiences, memories, films and dreams on the perception of architecture and the urban environment.

In 2015, she was invited by the Guggenheim Museum in New York to make her film Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina. Noordkamp dedicated it to the landscape monument by the Italian Arte Povera artist Alberto Burri (b. 1915, Città di Castello, IT; d. 1995, Nice, FR). The construction of the Cretto began in 1984 and was completed in 2015. Today, the work covers an area of 90,000 square metres.

The history of the Cretto di Gibellina (The Crack of Gibellina) by Alberto Burri is complex. Burri began working on the idea for the work in 1979. Between 1985 and 1989, he had a 1.50 metre high layer of white cement poured over the rubble left behind by the great earthquake of 14 January 1968, which destroyed the town of Gibellina and the lives of its 5,000 inhabitants. Streets, squares, houses, shops, schools, churches, a theatre and the 14th century Chiaramonte Castle—everything collapsed, burying people and their belongings. Around a hundred people died. Everyone else lost their homes and every family had victims to mourn. A traumatising and fundamental experience of the inevitability from the power of nature. Burri’s work, created eleven years after the event, preserves the ruins and covers them with a white layer of cement.

It is a place of absence, remembrance and silence. Burri’s greatness lies in the fact that he felt and respected people’s pain and grief. He gave it a form. Burri expressly chose white cement. For him, the colour white was a symbol of light. A light that resists the darkest experiences of destruction and death in this place. The seemingly hard material is itself vulnerable. Time makes it brittle. Caper plants take root and blast cracks in the surface, algae and moss decompose it, wind, sun and rain: all this reminds us of the human form of life, which is always vulnerable. The cement and the man-made form would disintegrate in the eternal cycle of growth and decay if the survivors of the earthquake had not dedicated themselves to the task of caring for the sculptural body of the Cretto. The people who founded the Associazione Gibellina Parco Culturale know how difficult it is to preserve the white of the concrete. Their care defies time and oblivion, because the Cretto should remain in its sublime beauty. As a symbol of an absence and at the same time as a sign of the power of beauty, this has great value to some people from Gibellina.

Burri searched for beauty. For him, it is the form that speaks to us in a strict balance of sensual and spiritual imagery. It is not the concept of beauty that conceals and glosses over the ugly, the incomprehensible, the hurt and the fragile, but rather the conviction that art absorbs them and makes them meaningful.

Petra Noordkamp spent many months in Gibellina. For her, it was an essential part of her work to experience the silence of the Cretto, to spend time there and to find a way, on film, to bring this place closer to people far away. She looked through historical photos and film footage that showed her the people who had survived the earthquake. She was moved by the images of times gone by and the life that is absent today. She incorporated this archive material into her film as a tribute to the friends and residents of Gibellina. For example, we see a scene featuring the father and brother of Nicolò Stabile, now organiser of the Associazione Gibellina Parco Culturale and activist, who became a close friend.

From the sky, Burri’s minimalist design looks like a white square, like a canvas that covers the entire hill, furrowed by deep fissures and cracks. These are reminiscent of the streets of the destroyed town of Gibellina. They are also evocative of the furrows caused by earthquakes. And they symbolise the cracks in the lives of the people who lost everything in Gibellina.

Petra Noordkamp deliberately chooses a point of view (alternate camera angle) at eye level. It is as if her film leads us through the paths of the Cretto di Gibellina. Her work evokes a sense of presence. Noordkamp gives the viewer the impression of walking through the place and feeling what may have happened there.

Petra Noordkamp invited the Dutch sound artist Nathalie Bruys to create the soundtrack for her film. She recorded ambient sounds on location—the sounds of the sheep, the wind and the birds—and integrated them as sound fragments into the final soundscape of the film.

Burri himself had stipulated that the Cretto should remain a place of silence. Only elements of nature should be heard—the birds, the wind and the crickets. No tourist hustle and bustle, no marketing should disturb. Moments of self-reflection. The experience of the individual as an expression of the here and now in the face of the eternity of space and time is created in this special place.

Noordkamp’s entire oeuvre is influenced by Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s thoughts on silence. According to the architect, the world is losing its mystery, its poetry and its sensual presence. The loss of silence and darkness symbolises man’s alienation from a spiritual relationship with the world and nature.

Petra Noordkamp’s film illustrates how Alberto Burri’s Cretto stands for its own history and as a scar in time. It is a reminder of the catastrophe and at the same time shows a place of beauty in the midst of the eternal hilly landscape of the Belice Valley. Here, art has fulfilled the task of covering a wound. To protect and preserve the wounded. The presence of the absent.

 

Petra Noordkamp (b. 1967, Losser, NL) is a Dutch artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Amsterdam (NL). From 1996 to 2000, she studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (NL). In 2012, Noordkamp presented her first short film The Mother, the Son and the Architect, filmed in the Chiesa Madre by architect Ludovico Quaroni in Gibellina (IT), in a solo exhibition at the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam (NL). The film was screened at numerous international film festivals. In 2013, she was an artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome (IT). In 2014, she returned to Gibellina at the request of the Guggenheim Foundation, New York (US), to create the short film Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina about the land art piece Cretto by Alberto Burri. This film was shown at renowned institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York (US), K21, Düsseldorf (DE), and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR). Her film When You Return I’ll Be Living by the Waterside (2017) had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2018. In 2017, Noordkamp created the diptych installation Fragile – Handle with Care, commissioned by the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo – MAXXI in Rome (IT). In 2020, she began the project Better Not Move in Tokyo (JP), which resulted in a book, a film, and several exhibitions.