During the night of 16th January 1968 a massive earthquake shook the western region of Sicily, Italy, tearing down dozens of towns and leaving hundreds of people dead. One of the villages that saw near total destruction was Gibellina. As rebuilding was pointless, it was decided to create a completely new town in a nearby valley. But what to do with the ruins? Italian artist Alberto Burri proposed to cover them with a large-scale replica of one of his paintings.

This is how one of the biggest sculptures in the world came to existence.

Unfortunately, the remote location and lack of funding didn’t help the artwork to be promoted among the general public, and nowadays it’s being mostly left uncared for in the remote Sicilian countryside, visited by just a handful of solitary tourists every day. When director Lorenzo Fonda heard about the place, he decided to go and explore it with very unique travel companions: a team of skateboarders. The documentary tells the journey of this team to go skate the artwork, and at the same time it reconstructs the history of the sculpture, narrating all the incredible events that led to its construction and the stories of the people involved in it.

Through interviews, archive footage, skateboarding footage, animated reenactments and even fictional segments, Lorenzo Fonda examines the implications of the creation of this sensational artwork, and in doing so raises bigger questions about the nature of public art and how art itself can outlast our own demise as human beings and bring forth our own legacy as a civilization.

The film is currently in post production.