Courtesy Giuseppe Ippolito (Photos) and Giovanna Giordano (Text)

Il Cretto è casa mia (The Cretto is my home) is be shown publicly for the first time at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The photographic work was brought to life in 2024 by the tenacious determination of Nicolò Stabile, who initiated it as part of his tireless work to preserve Alberto Burri’s Cretto and the history of Gibellina.

On display are portraits of people who survived the Belice earthquake, which shook and destroyed western Sicily several times in 1968. They are the last witnesses to this traumatic experience. The people affected lost relatives and their homes. The earthquake and the inaction of the authorities left them homeless and alone with the loss of their entire existence. After years in temporary barracks, Gibellina Nuova (the new Gibellina) was built 18 kilometres away. Artists and architects donated works and it became a city of a modernist utopia, which over the years was once again abandoned to decay.

In 2024, the participatory project Il Cretto è casa mia was created as an attempt to heal and reappropriate a place that, in its entire presence, bears witness to a deeply felt absence. More than fifty years after the earthquake, people have come together to have their portraits made, as they stand in front of the former ruins of their homes. In the 1980s, Alberto Burri’s landscape artwork, the Cretto di Gibellina, was created on these remains as a place of silence and remembrance. The artist succeeded in transforming the pain into a form of sublime beauty through a respectful creative act. His white layers of concrete shrouded the remains, like a burial shroud, preserving them in the secrecy of their interior.

Nicolò Stabile, himself a survivor and founder of the Associazione Gibellina Parco Culturale, is the driving force behind a visionary and monumental endeavour not to abandon this place to decay, but to preserve it and mobilise collective forces to do so. For years, he has been committed to preserving the art and the memorial site. In 2024, he invited the photographer Giuseppe Ippolito to take portraits of the survivors on site. The photo campaign, conceived as an ongoing process, now comprises 60 portraits, 34 of which are printed and shown for the first time as part of the group exhibition The Presence of Absence. The people whose faces we see belong to the last generation to bear witness to this shattering event for Sicily and the whole of Italy.

They look at us from the photographs and do not shrink back from the violence of history, but emerge as individuals. They tell their stories to the writer Giovanna Giordano, excerpts of which can be read in the exhibition. They are proud that Alberto Burri created one of the world’s most important monuments and his masterpiece from the ruins of their houses. A living place of landscape, memory and culture.

Nicolò Stabile (b. 1966, Gibellina, IT) worked in the 1980s alongside Ludovico Corrao (*1927, Alcamo, IT; †2011, Gibellina, IT), the former mayor of Gibellina, on the reconstruction of the city after the 1968 Belice earthquake. In the 1990s, he lived and worked in Brussels, BE, where he worked as a playwrighter, organiser, press spokesperson, and translator for various theaters, festivals, and artists, including Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels (BE), Kaaitheater, Brussels (BE), CharleroiDanses, Charleroi (BE), and Needcompany, Brussels (BE). He also worked as a producer for Thierry Salmon. In 2000, Stabile returned to Gibellina, where he led the Compagnia Caterina Sagna and realised numerous co-productions with prominent institutions such as Théâtre de la Ville, Paris (FR), Théâtre de la Bastille, Paris (FR), Festival d’Avignon (FR), and Venice Biennale (IT). From 2006 to 2010, he was responsible for public relations and the Ente Promozione Danza at Fondazione Romaeuropa, Rome (IT), as well as for the programming at Teatro Palladium, Rome (IT). Since 2010, Stabile has been dedicated to preserving and documenting the public art collection of Gibellina, particularly Alberto Burri’s Cretto. In this context, he has collaborated with artists, photographers, directors, researchers, dramaturgs, archives, universities, and institutions to document the city of Gibellina and its contradictions. Collaborators include Thierry de Mey, Marzia Migliora, Petra Noordkamp, Elisa Giardina Papa, Onorato & Krebs, David Williams, Maya Bosch, Christian Lutz, Pablo Fidalgo, Alexander Rosenkranz, Istituto Svizzero, Rome (IT), Accademia Tedesca Villa Massimo, Rome (IT), Fondazione Sandretto Re Baudengo, Turin (IT), and Archivio Pietro Consagra, Gibellina (IT).

Giuseppe Ippolito (b. 1987, Novara, IT) is an Italian photographer specializing in portrait and reportage photography for the publishing and advertising industries. His reportage work has been published in both national and international outlets, including The Guardian, Vanity Fair, La Cucina Italiana, Business Traveller UK, The Creative Brothers, Athleta Magazine, Suq Magazine, and Trentino Magazine. Ippolito is well-known in the food and beverage industry as a photographer of celebrity chefs, and he has collaborated with La Repubblica, Panorama, Dispensa Magazine, and Fine Dining Lovers by San Pellegrino. In 2017, he received a special mention from the World Photography Organization and was shortlisted for the Food Photographer of the Year award. Recently, he expanded his work to include the creation of institutional campaigns for Regione Sicilia, SIAE (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers), and MiBAC (Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities). Ippolito’s parents are from Gibellina.

Giovanna Giordano (b. 1961, Milan, IT) lives and works in Catania, IT, where she teaches philosophy at the Accademia di Belle Arti and works as a journalist and author. Giordano is known for her literary journeys from Sicily to other places beyond Italy. She studied African art history and regularly writes for publications such as La Stampa, Il Giornale di Sicilia, Il Mattino, and currently La Sicilia. She has received numerous awards, including the Premio Recalmare Sciascia for her novels, such as Trentaseimila giorni (1996), Un volo magico (1998), and Il mistero di Lithian (2004). In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her work Il profumo della libertà (2021) was nominated for the Premio Strega in 2022.

Since the beginning of mankind, Homo sapiens have endeavoured to understand their relationship to the world as a structure of meanings. Where do we come from? How do we relate to the other living beings that inhabit the planet with us? How are we part of an infinite universe? Spiritual beliefs and myths, but also scientific observations and the resulting world views change over time and are an expression of how we humans interpret our relationship to the world.

We are increasingly exploring and penetrating the world. We decipher connections, we organise, quantify and name. We have created ever more complex instruments to do this. We find methods, formulate verifiable theorems and establish causalities between cause and effect. Researchers describe the world as it is, both physically and biologically. They use science to formulate terms and concepts and constantly achieve verifiable results. They decode the world and follow methodical procedures that open up immense possibilities for action. In this way, we make the world available to us. But science does not set itself the task of asking about the meaningfulness of life.

And what does art do? Art leads everything back to us. It asks about the meaning of knowledge for us. Artists are concerned with perception, or rather, with the nature of experience itself. How we perceive, visually, linguistically and aesthetically, but also how the experience of life takes place as an existential experience of “being in the world”. And art can transform our relationship with the world through narratives, through images and sounds, through poetry, into an experience of resonance.

Both science and art have their origins in intuition, imagination and conjecture. While scientists have to create evidence, artists can proceed more freely and make associations and imagination the material of their narratives. The meaning of existence and the experience of transcendence can hardly be found in science. We humans have to find them within ourselves. And we often create symbols to do so.

The Presence of Absence highlights matter as a presence into which life imprints itself. Energy and life are potent yet transient. The interplay between life, energy and matter is a central theme of the exhibition.

The exhibition will spatially juxtapose exhibits that translate the abstract concept of the “presence of absence” into an expanded realm of thought from both artistic and scientific perspectives. Works by significant contemporary artists will engage in dialogue with scientific exhibits from geology and astrophysics, including casts from Pompeii, footprints of prehistoric humans from the Laetoli site in present-day Tanzania and replicas of prehistoric cave paintings.

The curatorial narrative explores the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes. Concepts of expansion, time and the infinite cosmos challenge our understanding. Simultaneously, they provoke questions about our identity and origins. Our planet hovers somewhere between the boundless and the eternal. For a fleeting moment, the window of our lives opens, revealing the unique experience of our existence through our bodies, senses and minds. Each exhibit, in its own distinct way, engages with this existential exploration of being and humanity across the dimensions of space and time.

With this exhibition, we also trace the origins of art as a fundamental human desire to express abstract ideas. Why did Homo sapiens, tens of thousands of years ago, carve animal figures and abstract geometric shapes into the walls of deep caves? Why did they create images of things that were understood by others as symbols, serving as a connection to higher, non-manifest, spiritual realms? Why did Homo sapiens, unlike other species, develop a need for transcendence?

One of the countless stories and myths that moved us is recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, written around 77 years AD, shortly before he met his death in the fiery ash rain of Pompeii: the myth of Butades of Sicyon, the Corinthian potter, and his daughter. The story goes like this: the young girl loved a young man who had to leave for a long journey. As the separation approached, the girl drew the outline of her lover’s head against the wall where the light of the fire fell. The father, moved by her plight, filled in this shadow image with colour and made a clay imprint of the outline, which he then fired. According to Pliny’s myth, art arises from the desire to capture the transient and fleeting; to preserve it out of wistfulness and longing, absence and memory, but also out of love and through beauty. This parable is touching because it embodies such fundamental feelings.

The outline, the stone wall and the fire—doesn’t this remind you of the earliest cave paintings and engravings found by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists on every continent? Were these the origin of art at the dawn of humanity?

The oldest evidence is attributed to the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back 140,000 years. With the migrations of Homo sapiens, cave art spread across every continent. Despite such incredibly extended time periods, this early art exhibits similar techniques and motifs. These seem to have been passed down from group to group, from generation to generation, long before the physiological evolution of the larynx and brain suggested the emergence of language and writing.

For tens of thousands of years, humans—early artists—created images of animals, human figures and abstract signs. Did they grapple with the same questions and ideas that modern humans do?

The cave paintings of the San people in South Africa and Botswana, or those from the Magdalenian culture of the Stone Age in Europe, served as a readable visual language for early humans. They depicted the experienced environment while also representing the spiritual cosmos of these ancient people. The stone walls, where humans created their paintings, far from the outside world and deep in the darkness of the earth, were more than just canvases. They were like a skin that separated this world from the other. Negative forms and imprints of human hands have been found in caves on every continent. These suggest the magic of contact, the touch of a hand on the surface of the rock as a gateway to another world. Leaving a handprint may have been part of a sacred act of connection with an invisible beyond—a transcendental experience. It is evidence of the primordial human need and eternal quest for a deeper relationship with a reality beyond the individual.

Awe in the face of nature. The feeling that there is more than we know. The striving to understand, to perceive through both our senses and our minds the eternal structures that reveal the order of everything in this universe and ourselves as part of it.

Since the dawn of humanity, people have gazed at the night sky. “Mathematics is the language in which the book of the universe is written”, said Galileo Galilei. It is a way of assigning meaning to symbols that can then be read and understood by others. Mathematics is a universal language of human thought, and mathematical rules reflect the order found in all natural processes, whether it’s the Fibonacci sequence or Einstein’s equations. This makes mathematics the purest form of expressing universal principles. Music follows precise mathematical structures, the growth of plants, the sequence of tides and every form of existence can be described by mathematical equations. Yet, there remains so much that humanity does not yet understand. Time and again, the power of the human mind will strive to push these boundaries.

What is the origin of all matter on earth and in the infinity of the cosmos? What effects do natural events create that reshape the earth and affect people’s lives with their power? And how do people deal with the existential need to face eternity in their finiteness? What myths and images do they create in order to connect with the spiritual? Is art a way of immortalising oneself in time? The exhibition is dedicated to these questions, which have been driving the human imagination from prehistoric times to the present day. Ever since we humans have existed on earth, we have created stories, symbols and signs to give form to our feelings, thoughts and knowledge, to leave traces in time and perhaps to connect with eternity.

We experience the miracle of reality through the senses of our body. This consists of the elements of exploding stars in space: the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood and the carbon in our cells. In fleeting moments, we connect with eternity and give traces of existence a material form. Art is one way of doing this.

I would like to thank Claudio Parmiggiani, Indigo and Mayo Bucher, the sons of Heidi Bucher, Toni R. Toivonen, Petra Noordkamp, the artists of the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective and Lawrence Malstaf, as well as the institutional lenders, Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Prof Dr Fabio Martini and Dr Lapo Baglioni of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”, the Natural History Museum Vienna, the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster, Nicolò Stabile, founder of the initiative Il Cretto è casa mia of the survivors of the earthquake in the town of Gibellina, as well as the photographer Giuseppe Ippolito, the VR creator Alberto Stabile and the writer Giovanna Giordano. I would like to thank the Italian Consulate General for its patronage. I would especially like to thank Prof Dr Andreas Mulch, Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, and Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt for a time of joint thinking and working.

Franziska Nori
Director Frankfurter Kunstverein