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| Gibellina detail, Sicily © Visual Athletics Club 2011 |
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| Alberto Burri's Grande Cretto, Gibellina, Sicily © Visual Athletics Club 2011 |
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| Alberto Burri's Grande Cretto, Gibellina, Sicily © Visual Athletics Club 2011 |
As with any unknown journey spatial variants play tricks - the less travelled road winds interminably. Time passes and the kilometres become even more elastic. As the road deteriorates, literally falling away down the mountainside, tarmac folded like felt, you swerve to avoid disaster. Your voice an unconvincing squeak, as you try and laugh off your own sense of foreboding. One more bend, one more bend and then another. No vehicles pass you. Finally, in the distance you see amongst the arid green and brown landscape a patchwork blanket of white concrete.
A contradictory luminosity. A man made memorial to mark a sight of destruction and devastation. In 1968 an earthquake destroyed the town of Gibellina. The town abandoned, the population relocated 20 kilometres north to Gibellina Nuova. In 1980 Alberto Burri artist, sculptor, transformed the Ruderi di Gibellina, the ruins of Gibellina into his Grande Cretto, Large Crack. The street plan meticulously adhered to, the claustrophobic intimacy of renaissance habitations encapsulated in the concrete blocks and the narrow fissures for streets that separate them. This little known entombment of concrete has since been reappropriated to become a signature style for other conceptual artists.
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