The paradox of ‘Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ or how to mock heritage to make heritage

Abstract

During the last 50 years, and due to the dilapidation of public funds, hundreds of unfinished public works have been erected Italy. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video declared these ruins a formal architectural style – ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ – and, in doing so, their aim is to change the buildings’ dark side and turn it into something positive. One of the tangible outcomes within the artists’ proposal is the eventual creation of the ‘Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ in Giarre, a Sicilian medium-sized village that has the highest density of unfinished public works in Italy. This article analyses how such a provocative project contains serious implications in terms of heritage. It is stated that, in order to forge a positivized ‘unfinished heritage’, Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park builds bridges between aspects that, in principle, seem to be the opposite of each other. This opens the possibility of putting traditional heritage assumptions in question through the production of a critical heritage whose novelty lies in the constructive use of irony, sarcasm and double meaning.

Keywords:

• Modern ruins
• temporality
• memory
• aesthetics
• unfinished heritage
• critical heritage

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alterazioni Video for giving their permission to use the figures that illustrate this article, and special thanks to Andrea Masu for the interviews I conducted with him. Thanks to Max Welch and Alfredo González-Ruibal for their constructive supervision. Thanks to Þóra Pétursdóttir and Tim Flohr Sørensen for organising the inspiring conference ‘On the Trace’ (Copenhagen, September 2016), where a draft of this article was presented. Finally, the present contribution would not have been possible without the Thüringer Graduiertenförderung scholarship granted by my university, my sincere gratitude for your trust.

Notes

1. Alterazioni Video have developed this idea with Enrico Sgarbi and Claudia D’Aita. Throughout this article, referring to Alterazioni Video implicitly involves the participation of these two external collaborators.

2. Giarre is a Sicilian town with a population of 28,000 people and nine unfinished public works, a proportion that makes it the settlement with the highest density of incompletion in Italy. On the other hand, and for operative reasons, Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park will be referred as ‘ISAP’ throughout this article.

3. This quote and many others that complement this article are the product of three different semi-structured interviews that I conducted with Andrea Masu between October 2014 and May 2016. These interviews are a particularly useful empirical method because, until now, there has not been a thoroughly written theorization on the artists’ practices. Yet though national and international media have already covered the topic of Incompiuto Siciliano, this paper is the first one to use Alterazioni Video’s first-hand testimony regarding the archaeological park in the realm of academia.

4. The basic principles of Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park and its primary negative reception somehow resemble the intention of artist Camilo José Vergara for creating an ‘American Acropolis’ out of Detroit’s ruins. In the mid-1990s, controversial debates aroused regarding this issue. For more information, see: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/us/a-tribute-to-ruin-irks-detroit.html.