Gibellina - Capitale Italiana dell'Arte Contemporanea 2026

article

DATE

15 Jul 2026

AUTHOR

Josseline Black

Gibellina - Capitale Italiana dell'Arte Contemporanea 2026

AUTHOR

Josseline Black

“Half a century after Beuys formulated the concept of social sculpture, there exists in western Sicily a remarkable experiment that appears to embody many of these aspirations. Destroyed by the Belice earthquake of 1968 and rebuilt several kilometres away from its original site, Gibellina occupies a peculiar territory between history and imagination, memory and projection, ruin and invention. More than a reconstruction project, it became one of the most ambitious experiments in public art undertaken in postwar Europe: a city rebuilt not only through architecture and infrastructure but through culture itself.”

Andrea Cusumano is an artist, curator, cultural strategist, and the artistic director of Gibellina Capitale Italiana dell'Arte Contemporanea 2026. Over the course of his career, he has worked across artistic practice, public culture, and large-scale civic programming, including the cultural programme of Palermo Capitale Italiana della Cultura 2018 and collaborations with major international institutions and biennials. Trained as an artist, Cusumano also worked closely with the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, serving for many years as conductor of his orchestra and contributing to the realization of large-scale interdisciplinary projects that blurred the boundaries between art, ritual, performance, and public life.

The following essay emerged from an extended conversation between Andrea Cusumano and myself concerning the history and future of Gibellina, the Sicilian town rebuilt after the Belice earthquake of 1968 and transformed into one of Europe's most remarkable experiments in public art and cultural imagination. While the city has carried this extraordinary artistic legacy for decades, the designation of Gibellina as Italy's Capital of Contemporary Art in 2026 has brought renewed attention, resources, and institutional support to a project whose significance extends far beyond its local context. Our dialogue ranged from Joseph Beuys' notion of social sculpture to contemporary forms of artistic research, participation, ecology, citizenship, and cultural reconstruction.

Rather than functioning as a conventional interview transcript, this text develops ideas that emerged through that conversation and places them in dialogue with a broader constellation of thinkers, including Joseph Beuys, Claire Bishop, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alejo Carpentier, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Clarice Lispector. The essay is therefore both a reflection on Cusumano's vision for Gibellina and the result of concomitant research into the relationships between public art, participatory practices, social sculpture, magical realism, and the reconstruction of the public sphere.

At its center lies a question that increasingly defines the present: if catastrophe can destroy not only buildings but the very conditions of collective life, can artistic imagination participate in the reconstruction of a common world?

The Art of Presence: Gibellina, Social Sculpture, and the Marvelous Reconstruction of the Public

“I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind from all repression. I say not that art has already realized this; on the contrary. And because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon. At first, there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.” — Joseph Beuys

Few statements capture the ambition of postwar artistic practice as forcefully as Joseph Beuys’ declaration. Art, in this formulation, is not merely a cultural activity, nor even a form of representation. It is a social force capable of transforming collective life. For Beuys, the true medium of art was not the object but society itself. The artwork could be a school, a conversation, a political movement, a forest, or an entire city. What mattered was the capacity of artistic imagination to reshape reality.

Half a century after Beuys formulated the concept of social sculpture, there exists in western Sicily a remarkable experiment that appears to embody many of these aspirations. Destroyed by the Belice earthquake of 1968 and rebuilt several kilometres away from its original site, Gibellina occupies a peculiar territory between history and imagination, memory and projection, ruin and invention. More than a reconstruction project, it became one of the most ambitious experiments in public art undertaken in postwar Europe: a city rebuilt not only through architecture and infrastructure but through culture itself.

Yet Gibellina is not simply a city rebuilt after catastrophe, nor merely a repository of public artworks. It is a long-duration social sculpture in which artistic research has participated in the reconstruction of the public itself.

Today, under the artistic direction of Andrea Cusumano, this legacy is being reinterpreted through a strikingly contemporary lens. Rather than describing contemporary art simply as the art of the present, Cusumano proposes a more radical formulation: “We are interpreting contemporary art not only as the art of the present, but as the art of the presence.”

The distinction is subtle yet profound. Modern art, ancient art, and Renaissance art are categories organized around historical periods. Contemporary art, according to Cusumano, possesses another quality. As he explains, “contemporary artists can present themselves, not only their work, but themselves as human beings.” Art becomes less a question of objects than of relationships. Presence displaces representation. The artist enters a community not as a producer of autonomous forms but as an active participant within a living social process.

This shift is particularly significant in Gibellina, where artists are not invited simply to exhibit works but to inhabit a territory marked by memory, loss, and renewal. Artists are invited into what Cusumano describes as “the city as a system of spaces, of relationships, of ideas.”The city itself becomes both medium and methodology. Artistic practice emerges through immersion in a living social organism whose knowledge is distributed across bodies, memories, rituals, architectures, and landscapes.

The story of Gibellina begins with catastrophe. The earthquake that devastated the Belice Valley in 1968 did not merely destroy buildings. It shattered a social world. Families were displaced, communities fragmented, and ways of life that had developed over generations were suddenly placed in jeopardy. The challenge facing the town was therefore not simply architectural reconstruction but the reconstruction of a collective reality.

At a moment when many residents were encouraged to leave, Ludovico Corrao insisted on another possibility. Reconstruction, he believed, could not be reduced to roads, housing, and infrastructure. A community needed more than buildings. It needed imagination. Initially focused on revitalizing local traditions of craftsmanship, ceramics, metalwork, sewing, bread-making, and other forms of cultural knowledge, Corrao gradually expanded his vision. Artists, writers, architects, and intellectuals were invited not to decorate a rebuilt town but to participate in the invention of a future.

Reflecting on this history, Cusumano observes that Corrao came to understand that artists could become “the twisting element, the revolutionary element through which to create the new vision.”

This was an extraordinary proposition. Artists were asked to confront destruction not through memorialization alone but through creation. Their task was, in Cusumano’s words, to help defeat oblivion and restore hope through a politics of beauty. Beauty here was not an aesthetic luxury. It functioned as a civic strategy. The creation of artworks, festivals, theatres, public spaces, and cultural institutions became a means through which a wounded community could imagine itself anew.

In this sense, Gibellina emerged directly from the horizon of Beuys’ social sculpture. For Beuys, society itself could become an artistic medium. Human relationships, political decisions, ecological systems, and collective imagination all constituted materials through which reality might be shaped. His famous assertion that everyone is an artist was not an aesthetic statement but a democratic one. Every individual possessed the capacity to participate in the creation of the social world.

As Cusumano observes, “contemporary art is not just about art, but it's about people.” The statement may appear deceptively simple, yet it anticipates many of the concerns that would later emerge in discussions of participation and publicness. If art is fundamentally about people, then its success cannot be measured solely through objects, institutions, or aesthetic forms. It must also be evaluated through the relationships and publics it helps bring into being.

Yet between Beuys’ social sculpture and contemporary discussions of participation stands another crucial figure: Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Gonzalez-Torres’ work offers an important bridge because it transforms Beuys’ collective vision into an ethics of participation. His installations depended upon the actions of viewers. Candies were taken away. Paper stacks were depleted and replenished. The work was never complete. It required others to exist.

As Gonzalez-Torres explained: “I need the viewer, I need the public interaction. Without the public these works are nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of the work, to join in.”

This statement illuminates Gibellina in a particularly revealing way. The city itself remains unfinished. Its meaning does not reside solely within monuments, museums, or public sculptures. Rather, it emerges through the ongoing participation of artists, residents, institutions, and visitors. Like a work by Gonzalez-Torres, Gibellina requires its public to complete it.

This notion of incompleteness becomes even more significant when considered through the work of Claire Bishop. Throughout her writings on participatory art, Bishop challenged the assumption that participation is inherently democratic or politically progressive. Too often, she argued, socially engaged art was evaluated according to ethical criteria alone, as though collaboration automatically produced social value.

Against this tendency, Bishop proposed a more demanding question: what kind of public is being produced?

For Bishop, the public is not a pre-existing community waiting to be represented. Publics emerge through encounters, negotiations, disagreements, and forms of collective experience. Participation matters not because it generates consensus, but because it creates conditions through which collective subjectivity can be imagined and contested.

This perspective is particularly useful in understanding Gibellina. The city emerged not from stability but from rupture. The earthquake did not merely destroy buildings; it shattered a social world. Community could therefore never be taken for granted. It had to be continually reconstructed.

Seen through Bishop’s lens, the projects unfolding in Gibellina are significant because they generate publics rather than simply involve participants. Virgilio Sieni’s choreographic work with residents from across the Belice Valley does not merely commemorate a shared history. It creates a temporary public through collective movement and embodied memory.

Here Cusumano offers one of the most compelling formulations of the entire project: “Dance and the embodiment of knowledge is a form of citizenship.”

The statement deserves to be taken literally. Citizenship is not reduced to legal status or political representation. It becomes something enacted through collective practices of remembering, performing, and inhabiting space together. The body itself becomes a site of public knowledge. Participation becomes a rehearsal for civic life.

Similarly, the ecological project developed around the abandoned artificial lake transforms residents into co-producers of a common space. The work is not meaningful because it includes participation. It is meaningful because it creates new forms of public responsibility organized around ecological care and collective stewardship.

What emerges through these projects is not simply a community but a public continually discovering itself.

Yet a more pressing question emerges from Gibellina’s history, one that extends beyond contemporary art altogether.

If the earthquake destroyed the physical conditions of collective life, what does it mean to rebuild a public? And, more importantly, what does this question mean today, at a moment when the public sphere itself appears increasingly vulnerable?

Across Europe and beyond, spaces of collective encounter are undergoing profound transformation. Public institutions face continual pressure, civic life is increasingly mediated by private digital platforms, and shared forms of experience are fragmented into individualized modes of consumption. The very idea of a common world—one in which citizens encounter one another across differences and participate in collective processes of meaning-making—can no longer be taken for granted.

This is precisely why Bishop’s question remains so urgent. The issue is not whether participation occurs, but what kinds of publics are being produced through participation. Publics do not simply exist. They must be continually enacted, negotiated, and sustained.

Seen from this perspective, the significance of Gibellina lies not only in the artworks it contains but in the public forms it generates. The city becomes a long-duration experiment in the reconstruction of public life itself.

Perhaps this is the deeper lesson of Gibellina. The challenge is no longer simply how to rebuild a city after catastrophe. The challenge is how to rebuild the conditions of public life when the public sphere itself is threatened by fragmentation, privatization, and social atomization.

Can artistic imagination participate in the reconstruction of a common world?

This question runs through the entire history of Gibellina. It animated Corrao’s refusal of displacement after the earthquake. It informed the invitation extended to artists during the 1970s. It remains visible in the contemporary projects described by Cusumano, where choreography becomes citizenship, ecological stewardship becomes a common good, and artistic research becomes a method for generating new forms of collective encounter.

The miracle of Gibellina is not simply that art survived catastrophe.

The miracle is that art helped make a public possible again.

It is perhaps in this sense that Andrea Cusumano's remark should be understood when he suggests that “maybe it's Italy that needs Gibellina.”

The statement extends far beyond Italy itself. In an era marked by ecological uncertainty, democratic fragility, social fragmentation, and the erosion of public life, Gibellina offers more than a model of cultural regeneration. It offers a demonstration that artistic imagination can participate in rebuilding the conditions of a common world.

The public that emerges in Gibellina is not only social but also temporal. Citizens encounter not merely one another but multiple layers of history simultaneously. The destroyed city remains present beneath the new city. Memory persists within architecture. Stories circulate between documentation and legend. It is here that Gibellina begins to resemble what Alejo Carpentier called *lo real maravilloso*—the marvelous real.

Carpentier famously wrote: “The concept of the marvelous begins to take form when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality, the miracle.”

For Carpentier, the marvelous does not emerge through fantasy imposed upon reality. Rather, it emerges when reality itself becomes so extraordinary that it exceeds conventional explanation.

Gibellina appears precisely in this register.

A city destroyed by catastrophe becomes one of Europe’s most ambitious experiments in public art. An abandoned modernist lake unexpectedly transforms into an ecological sanctuary. Stories persist of Joseph Beuys imagining a forest connecting old and new Gibellina, linking destruction and renewal through living matter. Whether this proposal was ever fully realized matters less than the symbolic power of the story itself. Like the narratives that populate the works of Carpentier or García Márquez, it inhabits the threshold between history and collective imagination.

The marvelous emerges not despite history but through history.

Magical realism, therefore, offers more than a literary analogy. It provides an architectural framework for understanding Gibellina itself. Architecture becomes a repository of overlapping temporalities. Absence becomes visible. Memory acquires material form. Past and present coexist. The city becomes a spatial expression of the marvelous real.

This condition ultimately returns us to Nietzsche. Throughout his philosophy, destruction and creation remain inseparable. Life renews itself through continual processes of overcoming. Catastrophe is not the opposite of becoming; it is often its condition.

Gibellina embodies precisely this logic. The city exists because something else disappeared. Its identity emerged through loss. Yet rather than preserving trauma as a static memorial, it transforms memory into a productive force. Artistic projects, public rituals, and collective encounters continually reactivate the possibility of renewal.

The reconstruction of the public is the true work of art.

And perhaps this is why the story of Gibellina ultimately feels less like a history than a beginning. Beneath the ruins, beneath the monuments, beneath the decades of artistic interventions, lies a simple act of collective affirmation: the decision to remain, to rebuild, to imagine, and to begin again.

As Clarice Lispector writes: “Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.”

In many ways, Gibellina exists between those two conditions: the never and the yes.

The earthquake represented the possibility of disappearance. Not simply the disappearance of buildings, but of a public. Streets can be rebuilt. Houses can be rebuilt. Infrastructure can be rebuilt. But the public sphere—the fragile network of relationships, rituals, memories, encounters, and shared meanings that constitute collective life—cannot be reconstructed through engineering alone.

This is the deeper significance of Gibellina. The city demonstrates that the reconstruction of a public requires imagination as much as planning, culture as much as infrastructure, and participation as much as administration. What emerged after the earthquake was not simply a new urban plan but an ongoing experiment in the cultivation of a common world.

Gibellina is not a monument.

It is a garden.

A monument is completed. A garden never is.

A monument stands apart from life. A garden exists only through life.

A monument can be abandoned and remain standing. A garden survives only through care.

The artists who arrive in Gibellina do not merely produce works. They become gardeners of the public sphere.

Through a prismatic form of artistic research, they approach the territory from multiple directions—through the body, through ecology, through memory, through architecture, through ritual, through performance. Each project reveals another facet of a reality that can never be exhausted by a single perspective.

The city itself becomes a living ecology of knowledge.

For what is increasingly endangered today is not culture alone. It is the public sphere itself.

The spaces in which strangers encounter one another.

The institutions through which collective meaning is negotiated.

The common worlds that exist between private experience and political life.

If these spaces are indeed threatened by fragmentation, privatization, and social atomization, then Gibellina offers something more than an example of successful regeneration. It offers a model of how artistic imagination can participate in rebuilding the conditions of public life.

The miracle of Gibellina is not that it survived catastrophe.

The miracle is that the public returned.

And that return was not a restoration of what had been lost. It was the creation of something new.

Today, Gibellina continues to be watered.

Like a flower that nearly died, it requires attention, imagination, participation, and care. The artists who arrive there do not complete the city. They contribute to a living process whose outcome remains unwritten. Each intervention becomes another gesture of cultivation. Each encounter another act of renewal.

The city remains unfinished because life remains unfinished.

And perhaps this is the deepest lesson of Gibellina: that the reconstruction of the public is not an event but a form of care.

Not a monument, but a garden.

Not a memory of life, but life itself continuing.

The miracle is not that it survived.

The miracle is that it continues to bloom.

Bibliography:

Beuys, Joseph. What Is Art? Edited by Volker Harlan. Forest Row: Clairview Books, 2004.

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. Translated by Harriet de Onís. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 [1949].

Cusumano, Andrea. Interview with Josseline Black, April 24, 2026.

Gonzalez-Torres, Felix. “Felix Gonzalez-Torres in Conversation with Tim Rollins.” In Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York: A.R.T. Press, 1993.

Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star. Translated by Benjamin Moser. New York: New Directions, 2011.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. *Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1978.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002. (Contextual reference)

Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. (Contextual reference)

BIOGRAPHY

Josseline Black is a contemporary curator, writer, and researcher. She holds an M.A. in time-based media from the Kunst Universität Linz and a B.A. in Anthropology (specialization Cotsen Institute of Archaeology) from the University of California Los Angeles. She operated for five years as in-house curator of the international artistic residency program at the Atelierhaus Salzamt (Austria) wherein she had the privilege of working closely with a number of brilliant artists. Included in her duties within the institution she allocated and directed the Salzamt hosting of the E.U. CreArt mobility for artists program. As a writer, she has reviewed exhibitions and co-edited texts for Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Portugal, Madre Museum Naples, the Museums Quartier Vienna, MUMOK, Guimarães Gallery, Gallery Michaela Stock. She is regular theoretical contributor to the Contemporary Art Magazine Droste Effect. In addition, she has published with Interartive Malta, OnMaps Tirana, Albania, and L.A.C.E (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). In tandem to her curatorial practice and writing, she has for the past decade used choreography as a research tool inquiring into the ontology of the performing body with a focus on embodied cartographies of public memory and space. She has held research residencies at the East Ugandan Arts Trust, the Centrum Kultury w Lublinie, the University of Arts Tirana Albania, and the Upper Austrian Architectural Forum. It is her privilege to continue developing her approach to curatorship which derives from an anthropological reading of art production and an ethnological dialectic in working with cultural content generated by art makers. Currently, she is developing the methodology which supports the foundation of a performance-based trans-disciplinary platform for a spectral critique on art production.

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