Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto is a waist-high concrete casting of the old town of Gibellina, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 (image via flickr user claude05).

The town of Nuova Gibellina, which was built to house Gibellina’s displaced residents, is now fantastically eerie, as it was imagined as a triumphant convergence of modern art and architecture, but has since been abandoned.

Imagine, for a moment, that the residents of Nuova Gibellina have decamped not for the cities and jobs of Palermo or Catania, but have returned to Burri’s shell, making the now-inverted casts of the familiar streets of their childhoods into new homes, hanging struts to support fabric roofs and strands of lights from concrete shelves. Or piling soil onto the outlines of old city blocks, watering and watching as grass takes root, and grazing sheep or organizing games of calcio on graves of their grandfathers’ houses.  Re-inhabited land art.

[Synchornicity link via Endlessfield]