Cast
Calco
(2019)
eng · ita
In Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto, the lost city of Gibellina is not rebuilt, but preserved through the form of its absence. The work appears as a negative cast of the vanished urban fabric: a surface that holds within matter the traces of streets, houses and pathways erased by the earthquake. Seen through a photographic reading, the fissures and fractures running through the concrete transform the surface into an unstable visual texture, where the physical presence of matter encounters the dimension of the mark. The cracks are not only wounds, but openings for the gaze: lines that lead into the image, making its depth uncertain. The concrete thus becomes a form of memory and, at the same time, a perceptual space in constant transformation. Like a photographic negative, the Cretto makes what has disappeared present again: a city impressed into the matter of its own erasure.
