© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

Alice, let's start from the beginning. We met in Lecce a few years ago. How are things in the city? I remember a wonderful light, a delicious pastry, and an extraordinary group of guys committed to photography. I know you're also very much involved with the LO.FT space ...

Alice Caracciolo (AC):I remember the days in which we met - here, there was a festival to which I am very attached, the Bitume Photofest - and I remember our semi-serious chats between the sea and long lunches. Here in Lecce life goes quiet, you breathe a different air that allows all of us cultural operators to work with more serenity. The interest in photography grows day by day and also synergies and initiatives. Even LO.FT has a new look: Francesca Fiorella and I have had the chance, thanks to the winning of the regional call PIN, to expand our spaces and activities. LO.FT has also changed its color, it is now yellow and blue, the atmosphere is more sunny, the spaces more welcoming and the initiatives more and more participated. But let's take a step back. LO.FT is a space dedicated to young authorial photography, through exhibitions, cultural events, publishing and training. In these three years of activity we have hosted exhibitions of young emerging artists as much as well-established names, workshops with internationally renowned authors and organized numerous cultural initiatives. Since a couple of months we reopened LO.FT, after a long period of restoration (what a struggle!); now we have a completely new exhibition hall, a pose room, a dark room, a photo and illustration bookcase, a coffee shop, and a large classroom for educational activities. We are designing a school of photography and visual design with annual and biennial courses (now our first annual course of technique and photographic culture is underway). We are also expanding the courses while defining exhibitions and events for the next autumn.

Your new project 'Piet[r]à', in collaboration with Cemre Yesil, is commissioned by Puglia. This is already interesting because, especially in Italy, it seems very difficult to find institutions capable of listening and dialogue with photography...

AC: Exactly one year ago Cemre was here in Lecce to work on the project which later became 'Piet [r] à'. It was a work commissioned by Proàgo - Links Management and Technology, as part of the call for tenders managed by the Tourism Section of the Puglia Region in collaboration with the Lecce association promoter of Bitumen Photofest, Positivo Diretto. Specifically it was an artist's residence in which five Apulian authors collaborate with five foreign authors. I would like to say that for the first time a regional commission found itself having to promote the territory with a strongly contemporary work and far from the somewhat stereotypical image of Puglia that we all have in mind. The strength of the project was precisely this, as much as the theme on which we reasoned and the operating methods. We discussed the ancient legends of 5 seaside villages of Puglia selected by the commission. It was stimulating, fun but above all a novelty for me too. 

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

'Piet [r] à' is a project that brings together distant cultural and geographical realities. What were the difficulties, the uncertainties, the opportunities?

AC: I told you about legends… During my residency I worked with Cemre, a Turkish photographer, and the legend we chose is set at the time of the Ottoman invasions of our coast in the fifteenth century. It has been stimulating to be able to compare ourselves, about six hundred years from the facts, on social, religious and political issues that concerned our history, our roots. It was also very interesting to analyze the socio-anthropological aspect of the legend we had chosen, ‘The wife of the Turk’, which tells the story of a young Turkish bride and her destiny tied to a statue from Puglia. The first difficulty I found was certainly confronted with such a labile theme, a legend, something by definition intangible, at least in the strict sense of the term. Another difficulty was perhaps not being able to immediately know the vision that Cemre had of those places, having initially worked at a distance. But when she came here, we already knew what we were looking for and what we wanted to achieve, and of course the contingencies of the case were fundamental for the development of the work.

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

With Cemre Yeşil we published a couple of years ago an article about his previous publication 'For Bird's Sake' with Maria Sturm. For you it is the first publication "in collaboration with". How was it working in a duo? Pros and cons? What did you learn from this photo lesson?

AC: I have always preferred to work in solitude, but this experience has certainly changed my way of approaching photography. Working in two has stimulated me more and has also shortened some processes. In this circumstance I can say that I immediately had a feeling with Cemre and fortunately also a very similar operating mode. I hope that these occasions for comparison can be increasingly frequent because these processes enrich us culturally and expand the way we see and interpret a given situation.

Let's talk about the project. The initial intent is clear enough, but how to translate it. In some ways it is the story of a story...

AC: Initially we tried to understand what connections could have the legend with the real world. We searched for "historical" elements such as the sighting towers located on the coasts of the Adriatic coast, elements certainly characterizing the landscape at the time of the invasions. We visited the museums to learn from the archeological collections, and we talked with people, to trace their memories and words. Later we tried to think about the main elements of the legend: the woman, the fertility, the journey, the sea, the contrast between peoples and, of course, the stone. The stone and its mystical and spiritual value, its being a silent guardian of our past, its being concretion of earthly materials, just like the emerged land of Salento, its corroding and becoming a grain of sand, ready to be moved by the wind towards unknown directions, its being rock and primordial cave that contains secrets that knows and corrodes only the sea.

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

From a linguistic point of view, what criteria have guided you?

AC: What interested us, in the development of work, was not the mere representation of a place that is witness to a story, nor in any way a scientific, documentary report. From the beginning we decided to work on the symbolic elements of this story. The stone and its symbolic meaning, but also mystical and religious, and above all on what involves its movement from one place to another. In fact, gestures are undoubtedly a very important element of our work, above all linked to an idea of exchange or subtraction. In ‘Piet [r] à’ photography always oscillates between a metaphorical interpretation of some elements of the legend and the reality, our experience and the historical aspect that has linked our lands.

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil from the series 'Piet[r]à' 

The project aims to become a publication?

AC: The project is already a dummy  The commission did not provide for the realization, but only the delivery of the photographic material produced. It was our choice to bring the work together in the book form; we worked intensively on the editing phase and we tried to return the concept of the work also, naturally, in this form. We have not involved other figures at this stage but we have been attentive to suggestions and advice from friendly people, both in the photo community and beyond.

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil images of the dummy book 'Piet[r]à' 

AC: Every detail of the book is thought, from the choice of the paper, to the cover, to the inserts. We believe that the book returns well the whole corpus of the work and that it is well suited to outline the salient points of the story. The cover also contains much of what Cemre and I then told in the book: it is a cardboard cover that reproduces, both in the first and in the fourth, the shape of a stone. It also reproduces a gesture, repeated in the whole corpus of the work, namely that of removing a stone from its original place; and then there is the blue of the sea, an element that brings us back to the history of our peoples but also to the contemporaneity. The pages inside are rough to the touch, as the story told is rough and its repetition even today, after centuries. We hope that the dummy can become a publication and we are moving to find a publisher interested in the work.

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil images of the dummy book 'Piet[r]à' 

A stone is always a stone. And yet… The book through a multitude of images show possible and different faces, surfaces, signs, shapes. Tell us about this statue ... 

AC: The stone, an inanimate statue, is made alive by the man who covers it with important and emotional values ​​and makes it impossible to remove. It becomes a collective history. In the work we asked ourselves some questions about it: what does it mean to move a stone? What does it take to remove a stone? How can you actually move a stone? Why do stories change with the movement of a stone? Do the stones take part in the so-called 'anima mundi'? Are stones inanimate objects? Are inanimate objects conscious? Are the stones to some extent conscious? Can we think of an unimaginably simple conscience of stones? Do stone statues have a soul? Is a stone just a material object in the mind of its perceiver? Does a stone inhabit a collective story? How can the mind and body interact through a stone? Photographs of stones can reveal the coherence between spiritual and philosophical traditions that cross cultures and centuries? How can a stone get in touch with spiritual traditions? Can we talk about private lives of stones? How is it to be a stone?

You are both in the book as authors and subjects. There is a need to intervene. To be in a different way. Why?

AC: Yes, we also portrayed ourselves in the work. We felt the need to be in this story because, as I mentioned before, it concerns the history of our peoples, which we had the opportunity to rediscover and re-elaborate at a distance of about 600 years from the events. This reflects our precise desire to bring our cultures closer again, to subject them back to an exchange, to attempt an approach in a historic moment for our countries of great mutual distrust.

© Alice Caracciolo & Cemre Yeşil images of the dummy book 'Piet[r]à' 

Then the sea, there is so much water, you can almost smell it. The water that forms, sculpts and frees the stone. Somehow it was necessary to bring the reader back to history, to the Turkish invasions, to the human back and forth, which is then that of the waves coming to kiss the earth for a moment and leave. A sea that seems to hold everything together. The Mediterranean is the continent made of water. Your work also has political reflections. What do you think about it?

AC: Sure. This was an element that we took into consideration in the implementation phase of the work. ‘Piet [r] à’ is also a story of immigration, of contact and clash between two peoples so similar, but in the end so different. Piet[r]à's immigrant is a woman, is the Castriota people and the Turkish people. All the characters in this story have a world of the past to which a world of the present belongs. We discover that these worlds hardly meet. The process of integration in 'Piet [r] à' is constantly interrupted by various factors: popular convictions, customs and traditions of the ancient peoples, anthropological institutions still well rooted today. Does the woman become "an object of exchange", "an object of contention", or redemption from sin? And the foreigner, after all, who is he? 'Piet [r] à' unveils, therefore, a story whose roots lie in the search for contact between peoples, constantly interrupted by the impossibility of men to compromise. History repeats itself the same, even after centuries.

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LINKS:
Alice Caracciolo
Cemre Yesil