This week would have been the opening of the Architecture Biennale in Venice, now postponed until this time 2021. In 2018, a project about the extraordinary 1972 theater of Pietro Consagra was center stage in the Italian pavilion. When I got to Gibellina and saw it, even with the debris in front and the disrepair, it was still one of the most beautiful structures, an example of this visionary sculptor's who envisaged each inhabitant would be transformed – in a “The Frontal City”, so they could "experience art...to keep oneself suspicious, susceptible, nervous, intolerant, evasive, enthusiastic, balanced, unbalanced, attentive, aggressive, lazy, imaginative, libidinous, free, ungraspable.” Consagra continued, “We no longer wish to live in cubes, nor in spheres or tubes. We do not want to end up in conventional dimensions dictated by the standards of mass production. We do not want to live within any concept of normalization...Whatever space we happen to use must be mobile, temporary, transparent, paradoxical and amenable to fluctuating ideas. It must evade the eternal structures of Power”. Today an effort is still ongoing to bring this utopian structure back to life.

When I was in Gibellina (see my report on Artnet) Sicily discovering the history of the modernist town that had been built adjacent to the ruins famously covered in concrete by Alberto Burri, I corresponded with designer and artist Nanda Vigo, who has died. Vigo who had worked with Gio Ponti and lived with Piero Manzoni, designed the 'Anthropomorphic Tracks" repurposed out of elements that had been destroyed in the 1968 earthquake. Vigo said (in her own translation), "My idea was to give remembers of the old village, so I recovered the remains of the very old fountain, still there from the time when the village was founded from Arabian people, and I rebuild it in the new town. I did the same with a beautiful “normanno” arch and with many pillars from the main church. All together I called “tracce antropomorfe” (anthropomorphic tracks). Vigo was a leader in the effort to help the town's mayor Ludovico Carrao in marshaling artists to help build this new city. Very candidly she considered the project something of a failure, " today Gibellina looks like a dead town, without the look and the hand of Corrao. The municipality of the town don’t take care at the monuments, enough the Burri “cretto” is now save thank to the private policy. There are living only old people, young population leave for the main town or strange country." Gibellina is being rebuilt, and Sicily is one of the first Italian areas to reopen. Still, I fear for the important but delicate ongoing preservation project.