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A monumental white shroud covers a hillside in the remote of western Sicily, it is both Land art - a vast monochrome embedded in the landscape - and a memorial to the town of Gibellina that was devastated by an earthquake in January 1968. Hundreds of people died in villages along the Belice Valley and tens of thousands were left homeless. After living in temporary shelters for almost a decade, the surviving residents of Gibellina resettled in Gibellina Nuova, several miles away. Invited to make an artwork for the new town, Burri instead envisioned an architectural sculpture that would cover the ruins and represent both the seismic disaster and the destroyed urban plan. Crumbled masonry was compacted within retaining walls and covered in an enormous shroud of white cement. The fissures of the resulting Cretto function as pathways that wind through an area of roughly 20 acres. Construction ceased in 1989 but was restarted in 2014 in order to build the last section of Burri's original design.

Commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum I visited the site several times over the past year to create a film that captures Grande Cretto as an experiential work of art filled with sense of place, memory and history.

'this usually poignant work of land art is represented here by a film by Petra Noordkamp that ends the show on a high note. Burri's cracks are in this case pathways for visitors, evoking both a ghostly street plan and an earthquake's rivening power.'
The New York Times , October 9, 2015

Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina (15 min.)
@ Petra Noordkamp and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
cinematography Petra Noordkamp, Stefano Bertacchini
sound scape Nathalie Bruys
editing Reynold Reynolds
text Maria Barnas
color correction Stefano Bertacchini
design Sabine Verschueren
set assistant Natascha Libbert

Selected exhibitions and screenings
Alberto Burri. The Trauma of Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Alberto Burri. Das Trauma der Malerei, Stifting Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf
Extraordinary Visions. L'Italia ci guarda, MAXXI, Rome
Un Art Pauvre, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Burri. Lo Spazio di Materia/tra Europa e USA, Fondazione Burri, Citta di Castello
Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisbon 2017 - Best Experimental Film
Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam 2017
Topos, Palazzo Belle Vue, Cannes
The Presence of Absence, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt

Here you find a small excerpt of Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina on vimeo

This film was made with financial support of the Mondriaan Fund, La FondazioneNY
and the Netherland-America Foundation