Images Gibellina: the open-air photography festival on its third edition

It was 1968 when the terrible earthquake in Belice hit Gibellina, changing forever the connotations of the territory. A destruction to which the city reacted thanks to a project of enlightened and visionary reconstruction by a group of intellectuals, which has transformed it into an extraordinary venue for Land Art. In addition to the environmental works that have remained permanently in its fabric, since 2016 the town hosts Images Gibellina, the first festival of photography and visual arts open air and site-specific in Italy, which this year returns from 30 July to 29 August, organized and produced by the Cultural Association On Image and the Swiss Biennale Images Vevey. An event that is identified not only as a photographic exhibition - widespread in the main centers of Gibellina, such as Piazza Beuys, Consagra Theatre, Mother Church, Fondazione Orestiadi, Botanical Garden, the Great Cretto Burri and others - but that expands to become an urban workshop with exhibitions, events, screenings, guided tours, talks and workshops.

Following the general theme of multiplicity, among the guests of Images Gibellina 2021 there will be Bruce Gilden (New York, 1946), one of the sacred monsters of the history of street photography with the project Italians; Francesco Jodice (Naples, 1967) that through Ritratti di classe investigates the changes in the contemporary social landscape; the collective Riverboom, with a research on the field of human relations in the post-pandemic era; and Maskbook, international project of participatory art of the organization no-profit Art of Change 21 in collaboration with Chinese photographer Wen Fang (Beijing, 1976), focused on the relationship between man and the environment. And yet multiplicity becomes pregnant in the photographic mosaics of Maurizio Galimberti (Como, 1956), which with the exhibition Gibellina molteplice, presents an unprecedented vision of Gibellina’ scenarios, a tribute to Sicily.