ARTQUAKE. The artistic performance rule in the post earthquake reconstruction

The dramatic latest events referred to the Central Italy earthquake draw to the international scientific community’s attention the resilience concept, which original meaning, connected to the metallurgical field, indicates the resistance expressed by a material when it’s exposed to a dynamic broken test. By extension, in psychology, the term indicates the individual’s or community’s ability to positively react in the face of a traumatic event by finding an ideal similar in the kintsugi (literally “to join by gold”) old Japanese artistic practice, in which broken pottery fragments are recomposed using vegetal glue and golden dust, by returning new sense to the object’s life though exalting its cracks with a valuable material. Being inspired by that art and applying its sense to the contexts hurt by the earthquake events, the essay starts from a cases study selection (presented by dedicated detailed forms) to explore the deeper meaning and the results that the artistic intervention, in common with the golden welding, it’s able to produce in environment devastated by natural disasters, as well as the rule that the figure of the artist has played in the past and is playing still now, with new meaning, in the post-quake reconstruction. By assuming like a central idea the both emblematic and incomparable case represented by the Great Cretto of Gibellina by Alberto Burri, in which the scar, memory of the drama and destruction, rises to a real artistic value.