DEVASTATION AS MONUMENT

Before the famed memorials designed by Eisenmann and Lin, in 1985-89, rose Alberto Burri's high concrete sacks of a citywide Cretto: grey foundations as petrifaction and geometrical shroud for the rubble of the town of Gibellina—Gibbiddina in Sicilian, from the Arabic Gebel Zghir ("small mountain/height")—medieval in aspect, though founded before the Greek settlements of Magna Grecia, finally destroyed by earthquake in 1968. Fissures here chin high are the steep streets, the blinds, the channelers of uncanning echoes, and inorganic register of the confrontation between fields of food everywhere facing this rigid yet wholly pierced-by-dry-flora site of devastation.