Old Gibellina: the map,the world,the Aleph

Horizons

This article aims to approach the landscape question through a reflection on the role that heritage can play in the reading of places during the study of communities. Its theoretical reference lies in the reflection, typical of cultural geography, that identifies landscape as a complex epistemological construct, a true mediator ¹ in the dynamics of perception and representation of the relationship between humans and space. ²

Landscape then, seen here as the interpretative key of the world or, better, of the I/world relationship, finds in cultural heritage, especially art, an important junction: a sign, ³ a symbol that deeply and diachronically affects the sense of place and bond that connects communities to places. ⁴ Cultural heritage is, therefore, no longer characterized only by its aesthetic or historical dimension but above all by its being a witness of the relationships that determine human action on territory. ⁵ Heritage is a sign of landscape; it is synthesis and source of meanings. It is the tile, exposed to time and generations, of the complex mosaic of landscape.

With the solace of these hints of reflection, I attempt to provide a reading of the multifaceted and complex interpretations offered by the ‘Grande Cretto’ (Figure 1); the Cretto ⁶ (37°47′17.09″N 12°58′16.62″E) is the great work of Land Art by the artist Alberto Burri in Gibellina, a village devastated by the earthquake that, in January 1968, hit the Belìce Valley, in southwestern Sicily, Italy. ⁷ ‘Gibellina did not exist on the map, now it is no longer even on that hill’, Sergio Zavoli remarked in the earthquake’s aftermath on a television report for RAI (Italy’s national public broadcasting company). ⁸

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Figure 1.

Burri’s Cretto in Gibellina.

I have traced the importance of the landscape to understanding the deep structure of the relation between humans and space. The cartography, the map, represents a parallel effort: representation as a way to knowledge. What happens, then, when the world, the map and the landscape converge? What happens when these three elements of a single knowledge process coincide in a place? This is the core question that this article tries to address.

The Cretto represents an interesting case study. Led by Borges, I propose my considerations about the Cretto’s landscape value. Then, in the conclusion, I try to define this complex place through a powerful figure of speech: the synecdoche.

Old Gibellina

The world and the map, antipodes of the process of knowledge that is the relationship between humans and places, are reality and representation, both irreducible. But there are places where reality and representation converge: I want to call them ‘Aleph’.^9,10

And then, the Poet’s paradox powerfully comes to mind:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. (Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’ ¹¹ )

Beyond the new city of Gibellina, the street, Strada Provinciale 5, leads into the rural hinterland of the Belìce Valley, following the slopes of fertile and generous hills and passing through sporadic houses torn apart by the 1968 earthquake. Unexpected, perched on the back of a hill, appears the Cretto, Alberto Burri’s Land Art majestic artwork that has sealed Gibellina’s ruins.

Ludovico Corrao, New Gibellina’s mayor, invited the artist Alberto Burri to Gibellina in the 1980s. Burri has been fascinated by the site of Old Gibellina and decided to create the ‘Grande Cretto’ over it. ¹²

It is not my interest to analyse in this context the artistic implications of the artwork, completed in 2015, or the debate around the Belìce. ¹³ Instead, we stay at that bend of the Strada Provinciale 5, which, elevated, allows the eye to carry out, through a gaze, ¹⁴ a precise cognitive function of ‘mental geography’, ¹⁵ the reading of the landscape that, ‘not limited to what the eye sees, appears immeasurable to the mind’. ¹⁶ From that loop, with a diagonal look, the Cretto appears in its plastic wholeness.

If, comforted by the lesson of Wright, who assigned to the imagination an incomparable cognitive charge, ¹⁷ we allowed the mind’s eye to rise above the Cretto until it is perpendicular to ground level, we would get a new image of the world. We would read the world through the mediation of the Cretto, which is the unique form of the Borges’s paradox: the 1:1 scale map. Old Gibellina is like the Deserts of the West [where] still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map. A piece of concrete map, in full size (Figure 2), which corresponds to the cultural landscape and the world which represents: the Cretto so becomes the place where the world, the map, and the landscape converge.

Aleph.

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Figure 2.

Burri’s Cretto in Gibellina.

In this cartographic reading, the Cretto embodies new meanings: it is an abstract and approximate representation; it is symbolic, but not reduced. What are the peculiarities of the Cretto, seen as a 1:1 scale map? The more intense abstraction and approximation are especially expressed in the volumes through which the spatiality is organized; the distortion resulting from the globe’s transposition into the plane tends to disappear in this case.

Compared with the symbolic dimension, it is useful to recall the reading that Guarrasi proposes of the earthquake, ¹⁸ an event of catastrophe that, as in the parables of Greek mythology, melts existing intertwines and creates new ones. The earthquake is the terminus post quem for the processes of identification and local development that involve the Belìce to this day. ¹⁹ The Cretto, the Map, is then the symbol of the dynamism inherent in the catastrophe.

It is a symbol of memory, ²⁰ of the slow processes of the Belìce Valley’s reconstruction and the living one of the uprooted and wounded community. It is a symbol of resemanticization with its artistic value, monumentality, and promotion of initiatives. The Cretto is landscape intimately tied to the Belìce communities’ sensibilities and recognized from the outside.

At a critical glance, that candid mortar does not seem to clash with the surrounding land. The Cretto and the surrounding rural landscape are integrated in a common process because they corroborate each other. They belong to each other because they share the same history, ²¹ the same impetus. ²²

Integrated with the history of the territory and the communities, the Cretto is consolidated in its dimension of landscape element and metaphor. It is a sign that crosses time and a symbol of communities destroyed and reborn. It is an engraving or, better, a surfacing that represents an unavoidable knot of the Belìce territory, marginality and problematic paths of redemption, a similarity that, following Alessandra Bonazzi’s reasoning, unites the particularity with the generality of the context. ²³

Going back to observe, then, with feet planted on the ground, travelling along Provinciale 5 to the hill’s base, crushed on the Cretto’s wall, we locate the breaches: we can cross them and we can go through the city (Figure 3). We can experience the social space. ‘Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur’, ²⁴ meant or resemanticized from the communities, from their doing, thinking and representing it.

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Figure 3.

Burri’s Cretto in Gibellina.

Conclusions

This article can meet the debate that considers cultural heritage as a constitutive element of the landscape. I found in the Cretto a case study that exceeds expectations. If we consider the Cretto not only as a monument but as a map, we are pushed to think in epistemological terms. It can in fact be argued that the Cretto closes in some way the gap between reality and representation, between landscape mediation and the world. The Cretto is in fact, at the same time and in the same place, map, monument, landscape and world, a place that only the strength of literature can try to define.

A synecdoche, the Cretto, together tile and mosaic, is a silent crossroad of memory and future, of dead and reborn communities, of visitors and travellers, a white sarcophagus and place that mutates. In the gaze’s acting and unifying function, the essential principle of the landscape approach, the Cretto is landscape. It is the trace of local history and a sign to understand the present and the future. In Old Gibellina, in the middle of the edge, it is both reality and representation. In Old Gibellina the map is the world.

Aleph.