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

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