Fifty Years After An Earthquake In Italy: A Radical Public Art Experiment

While such “Concrete Utopias” are now getting attention in museums, it was actually the concrete Utopian city of Gibellina Nuova that became an open-air laboratory for assessing the healing capabilities of public art. Today, 50 years since the earthquake struck, many look back on Carrao’s radical experiment in civic engagement, rehabilitation, and unification as a cautionary tale. But new efforts are now underway to realize a more pragmatic version of that utopian dream.