© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

We don't know precisely when our memories and consciousness begin to form. We all have a first episode - a shock, a dream, an encounter - which we usually use as the starting point for our entire personal history. Sometimes, they are ghosts that cross us in an impalpable way. They are blurred faces, voices, and smells that make us wince for a moment while the past emerges, never fully clear and entirely. Collective memories are different, forming belongings and beliefs that unite communities by transmitting an oral heritage that is always coherent through generations, even if never identical. The stories of our childhood belong to such a background. The Boogeyman, or some urban legends, entered our memories as real episodes that do not enjoy any tangible concreteness. No one has ever seen the Boogeyman, yet we have all seen it; no one has ever met the man with balloons near the school because meetings and visions took place at a deeper level of our consciousness, gradually taking shape through whispered fears, threats, warnings. In Ghostbusters, the Boogeyman grows up through children's fear. The fact that we cannot trap it as an ordinary ghost does not mean that he does not exist but that he is an equally substantial presence. It does not matter if it looks like a giant bird; if it has a hoarse or thin voice; if shadow or silence makes it since the Boogeyman spreads the same fear on everyone.

Priscilla, you have chosen to show what, by definition, has no form and which escapes the light and escapes the same narrative possibility. You then went further because you investigated the feeling that unites the fragmented memories of the children who have crossed paths with it; what Ciucciuì is, tell us something about the process that made a discussion around it possible and what this ancient shadow represents.

Priscilla Pallante (PP): That of the Ciucciuì is a story like many others. Like all childhood stories, it has the incredible ability to stimulate experiences that have never occurred but which cannot be considered less real than the truth. None of us children ever saw the Ciucciuì, yet each has a clear and still alive image of how it should look. None of us was ever sure which animal sound it was, yet we heard it at least once. In a historical period in hard to believe in the absence of images, I felt almost obliged to preserve and validate through the photographic medium what accompanied my family and me in that complex path that growth is and that inevitably influenced our imagination. I had no evidence, no documents, only the voices of those who had grown up with that story. Words that I transcribed, dismembered, and reassembled in a new form that came close to my memory of those events. From here began my process of re-elaboration and reconstruction, making those proofs and images that I missed. I used various tools, exploiting their field of use and, consequently, the unconscious position that a user could assume for the images they produce. For example, an infrared and motion sensor camera allowed me to transform what I had reconstructed in my studio through 3D printed scale landscapes as irrefutable proof that something happened in front of it at a given moment.

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

Ciucciuì is a work that uses different contributions and languages to return a complexity that reflects the multiplicity of points of view and mnemonic and experiential reworking of a group of people concerning the same history, handed down orally. Ciucciuì is a synaesthetic experience based on the search for representation and suggestions related to sound (through a translation of the pixel distribution into frequencies) to offer possibly a complete portrait of collective memory. It is a work that reflects on the functioning of memory and its fragmentation and amplification. But, at the same time, it opens up the impossibility of the photographic medium of giving back a form to something that is not tangible, encouraging the interaction between different languages ​​to build documentation of processes and objects not visible, and finding new representation strategies.

Contemporary images interact more and more with audio and fragments of movements, mixing in different ways and leading to a broader experience than the classic video or cinematic one. You have introduced 3D reconstructions, a not-so-common technique. How did you cope with it?

PP: In my research, audio is an autonomous element, despite it being deeply connected with images (the latter come from the images themselves, other times, they emerge from the sound). While audio and picture are enjoyable at the same time in cinematography, in my work, there are no temporal constraints to the use of one and the other. Both exist independently, so it is not clear which of the two came first. This modality imitates and, at the same time, inverts the modality in which it is usual to move in the world through different senses, in a synaesthetic approach that amplifies the individual senses and provides different ways of reading the same work. I approached 3D printing almost out of necessity: working on the invisible, the intangible, or what does not exist, I had to produce the subjects of my photography by myself to be able to transform them into photographic objects. I translate something born in the virtual through the photographic medium, which then falls into a material dimension and the virtual plane again through printing. However, gaining a certification of existence thanks to the intervention of photography.

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

Ciucciuì problematizes reality and underlines how, even today, a human dimension capable of going beyond the rational still survives. Although contemporaneity seems to have as its only mythology derived from technological innovations, you overcome the polarization often found in photography's debates: between mere reproduction of reality and romantic possibility distant from experience. You are hinging on both sides, raising attention on everyday life while revealing all those visions that would not be able to emerge otherwise. This discourse on reality seems constant in your production, like in Plastic vol. II, in which you decompose the subject and translate it into waves, materials, and movements (or static ). How are so many languages ​​intertwined? What are the technical implications? 

PP: The limit of photography in the objective reproduction of reality is central to my research which stems from a reflection on the medium. What initially appears as an obstacle becomes what drives and transforms my "impossible" theses into something credible. Today, as I continue with the research, I gradually move away from an analytical attitude that aims to focus on the process. I am heading more towards a narrative approach in which the process is fundamental yet not visible so that new technologies fill the gaps of the photographic medium and make accessible to photography what otherwise would not be. 

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Plastic vol. II' . D3;#3: Vavilov, "Don Chisciotte" (first version)

This approach starts right from Ciucciuì and is continuing to evolve. There are technical difficulties, but the study is necessary and exciting. Each time I find myself getting passionate and intrigued by different things, I believe that this continuous stimulus is one of the aspects that I love the most. In general, I tend to use tools that are accessible and within everyone's reach because they are often the ones that most easily make mistakes. Digital error is an aspect that particularly interests me: where automation fails, images and new perspectives raise again. In my research, failures become protagonists rather than rejections.

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

Your research ended up in a book. I'm curious to know this step, how the same work can respond to different solutions: portfolio, exhibition, book. I would also like to know your relationship with photographic publishing in general. This world seems to be expanding today, given that publication is a goal that many photographers and artists, in general, want to achieve.

PP: I believe that the same project transforms itself every presentation and continuously evolves according to the space and context that embraces it. Ciucciuì was born as an installation, and then it developed as a digital narrative to end its journey in the book object. The book is the form I wanted for the project from the beginning; necessary to organize an oral tradition and its multiple voices in an object with its materiality, in a physically present trace and document. The words extracted from different documents and voices reorganize to produce a story that tends to change according to how we read it. So the work transforms into a narrative flow in which the text represents at the same time a clue and a denial. Other senses of reading intertwine in the text and images, leading to a continuous operation of concealment and discovery. My relationship with publishing is a beautiful love story. I am among those who buy photobooks almost compulsively. A book is nothing more than a small-scale installation and, as such, offers infinite creative possibilities. Ciucciuì was my first experience as a book designer. I will undoubtedly continue along this path.

© 'Ciucciuí' by Priscilla Pallante, published 89 Books, 2021

© 'Ciucciuí' by Priscilla Pallante, published 89 Books, 2021

© 'Ciucciuí' by Priscilla Pallante, published 89 Books, 2021

© 'Ciucciuí' by Priscilla Pallante, published 89 Books, 2021

© 'Ciucciuí' by Priscilla Pallante, published 89 Books, 2021

Let's talk about the future: photography is changing, and at the same time, its possibilities of use are also changing. How do you imagine the evolution of your work and photography in general? How do you think the "places" dedicated to the image will also change: schools, academies, events, etc.?

PP: Photography is a young art, and as such, it is undergoing a change that other Arts have already experienced. It is a process that began some time ago, but as more and more authors are moving in this change, this process becomes more evident and undeniable. It seems that there is a tendency to use the photographic medium more and more as a tool and not as a purpose, that photography increasingly finds support from other arts and that contamination is a recurring feature. I believe that a study on representation should include less rigidity than the instrument used and more attention to the content rather than the purity of the form.

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

© Priscilla Pallante from the series 'Ciucciuì'

In many academies around the world, training is opening up to more radical experimentation that takes digital into consideration and uses it as an amplification tool and an opportunity for reflection on the photographic medium itself. I hope that this path will also find space among the Italian academies. I believe that photography will open up more and more to the possibilities of the virtual and that it will be able to find in the digital considerable growth potential. This would trigger a circular process of materialization and dematerialization of the photographic object and produce opportunities for all those researchers in transmedia. More and more spaces and galleries are beginning to approach the world of Nft; for example, I am working on it, followed by Niccolò Fano. It is a rapidly growing reality that cannot be ignored, like progress in general. Opening up to progress and the evolution of a language does not mean denying the past. But to take it to a higher level of creative possibilities and opportunities for reflection on language itself and the infinite possibilities that the extension of a physical space through a virtual arena can generate.

Priscilla Pallante (website)
Book 'Ciucciuí', 89 books