Attivita 2

The expositions, The Gurfa Alessandro Belgioioso’s pictures and James Turrell’s Roden Crater project installations, will be open during the Festival, July 6/12. Moreover, they will be displayed together in another exibition and presented in one catalogue, Land and Light, from the Gurfa to the Roden Crater, in English and Italian, producted by Skira.

The exibition will last three months.

Alessandro Belgiojoso’s The Gurfa

The Gurfa is an example of rock-cut architecture. The 5 caves were excavated out of a red sandstone rock near Alia, in Sicily. The exact date is uncertain, but it origins seem to go back to

2500 BCE (copper-bronze age). The complex is built on two main levels leading to a bell-shaped room (tholos). This building, very interesting from a cultural and architectural point of view, is a real Pantheon and probably the seat of the council. Likely, the name goes back to the Arab domination period in Sicily: actually, in Arabic, Gurfa means “room”.

Alessandro Belgiojoso has photographed this mysterious place, creating light suggestions and effects that represent his search focused on the theme of the “impossible journey”.

Round Table study on the Gurfa of Alia

The Gurfa Caves is being studied by CNR’s archaeologies and by the University of Palermo to establish its date of construction.

Many personalities will be invited to the exhibition and the festival. They will give an interesting support for a deeper study of thr sicilian cave.

During the Festival, a Round Table will be held at “Palazzo Steri”. The CNR, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee and many archaeologies and architectures in collaboration with the University of Palermo will participate to the conference.

Turrell’s Roden Crater Project di Turrel edited by Agostino De Rosa and Imago Rerum

The Roden Crater project is the most important land art in the world.

The project has been ideated by the American artist James Turrell (Los Angeles 1943) inside a dormant volcano in the Painted Desert, Roden Crater (Arizona, USA).

The work is characterized by the realization of 15 hypogeum rooms inside the Roden Crater.

The exhibition “Geometries of lights” displayed the digital reconstruction of the real project. It was realized by Prof. Agostino De Rosa’s team (Director of the Imago rurum team) from the IUAV, University of Venice, Faculty of Architecture, in collaboration with James Turrell.

Sole Luna has realized the models for the 18 rooms of the project.

The exhibition will be displayed in 2011, inside the anthology dedicated to James Turrell in the Solomon Gugghhenheim Museum of New York, with some photos of the sicilian Gurfa Tholos (that will be displayed around the world).

James Turrell will deliver the lecture: “Plato’s cave and the light inside” on the 11th July 2009 in the cloister of the “Complesso Monumentale di Sant’Anna”.

LAND AND LIGHT

From the Gurfa to the Roden Crater

The archaeological study carried out by the Prof. Carmelo Montagna and Dr. Massimo Cultraro has shown how incredibly refined and complicated the architecture of a prehistoric THOLOS (Hypogeum cavity) can be.

Gurfa complex presents a deep analogy with James Turrell’s work, a contemporary artist that for many years has been developing a land-art project inside Roden Crater cavity, a dormant volcano in Arizona.

Sole Luna, a bridge between cultures, wants to create a “bridge” for the study and the comparison between the prehistoric hypogeum architecture in Sicily and James Turrell’s avant-garde conceptual art.