Gibellina PhotoRoad: a review

The town of Gibellina, located in inland Sicily, is a special place on its own. After the original old town, perched on the mountains, was destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1968, a new city was rebuilt around twenty kilometres downwards the valley.
The reconstruction of Gibellina Nuova took over thirty years to be completed and was designed by many of the most prominent artists and architects in Italy at that time, gathered by the town’s Mayor Ludovico Corrao. Gibellina today is a fascinating open air museum, characterised by a unique collection of public art and a visionary urban structure. On the other hand, the new town is fragmented and over-dimensioned for its needs, and it leaves the visitor with a feeling of alienation for its plain surfaces and enormous spaces, which bear so little relation to the indigenous architecture.

Gibellina is not new to relevant cultural kermesses, having hosted every year since the ‘80s an important festival dedicated to theatre and performance arts, among other things. Nevertheless, many of these events have been somehow detached form the town’s everyday life and its living spaces, taking place mainly at Fondazione Orestiadi - Gibellina’s major exhibition venue - and, of course, at Burri’s Cretto (if you don’t know what it is, run and Google it), that are both outside the city center - even if Gibellina does not properly have any.
On these premises, the idea of revitalising Gibellina’s still undervalued artistic wealth by organising another festival could sound either naive or too ambitious. Anywhere in Europe and the world, festivals of various disciplines suffer from being spot events that are able to gather lots of people in the same place along a week or weekend, but often fail in creating a real connection with the place itself, once the footlights are turned off. Photography festivals are even more vulnerable, having to deal with the photograph’s physical presence that can’t compete with the power of installation and public art. At least so far. 

Gibellina PhotoRoad - whose first edition was launched this past July and will close on August 31st - leapfrogged the steps that many “elder” festivals have been walking in order to emancipate from the traditional display formats and achieve a larger impact on the context, by focusing entirely on the “open-air” concept. Most of the exhibitions were set up outdoors and consisted of large prints, projections and site-specific installations.
The featured photographic projects and series are linked by a theme, namely “Disorder”, and all of them, more or less loosely, revolve around the idea of a creative chaos that can produce new ideas and unforeseen possibilities. But rather than that, it is the relation between the single projects and their locations that creates a sense of coherence within the whole festival’s program. One of Gibellina’s peculiarities lies in its squares: in their spacious and obsessively rhythmic structures, they remind of the metaphysical urban landscapes painted by Giorgio De Chirico, especially when flooded by the harsh Sicilian noon light. It sounds like a tough nut to crack, but artistic director Arianna Catania was brave enough to turn these characteristics into one of the festival’s key strengths, “daring” to put photography and architecture on the same level.

In my opinion, the most successful example is Les Personnages/Les Paysages by French photographer Valerie Jouve. Her projects, that combine portraits of people in motions and metropolitan buildings, are installed in big prints on the Town Hall’s grey, geometric facade: in this case, both the photographic series and the building gained something from the mutual relation - the firsts being enhanced in their meaning by the building’s severity, the second acquiring an unexpected sense of movement.
The opportunity of playing with a peculiar space was cleverly seized by the winners of the Open Call, the artistic duo Rumore Pair, that adapted their project Creations - an investigation into the matter and the origin of life on Earth that starts from the stone, seen as a fossil of memory and chaos - to the System of Squares that was allocated to host it. By choosing to leave the prints unframed and free to be moved around by the visitors, they bypassed the temptation of "fighting" against an overwhelming architecture and enhanced instead the active participation as a way to humanize it.

Being present during the opening days, one aspect I could witness and I really appreciated was that the whole kermesse did not address only photography lovers. Thanks to summer season, which brings home many citizens who during the rest of the year live elsewhere, in Italy or abroad, all exhibitions have benefited from a constant flow of visitors - including many locals, curious to understand what was going on. Very tender, in this sense, the idea behind the project Roundtrip of printing large portraits of youngsters that left Gibellina in order to work or study, and to install them on the windows of places each of them feel particularly attached to - mainly their former houses, where the rest of their families still live.
A grand slam scored by the festival is the re-opening of Palazzo di Lorenzo designed in 1981 by architect Francesco Venezia: an almost uncanny building characterised by a majestic internal courtyard that treasures, by including it in its structure, the ruin of the original Palazzo Di Lorenzo destroyed by the earthquake. The accessibility to such a building - that hosted some of the exhibitions, as well as the talks that took place during the opening weekend - is a great gift to both citizens and visitors.

The future goal is now to ensure that the festival will become an annual event, or perhaps biannual, considering the human and economic resources that have to be put on the table: it would be a pity if the unicity of the place, mixed with the many still unexplored possibilities of photography, was to be exhausted in a single trial. A better technological equipment is surely needed, as well as a more refined design of all exhibitions and a stronger international echo. But it’s good to be surprised and it’s sometimes good to dream - so, to say it with the passionate words by Ludovico Corrao himself, who rebuilt a whole city from scratch, “maybe from this freedom, this incandescent magma, a new era will arrive”.

www.gibellinaphotoroad.it