Every child in my family grew up listening to the story of the Ciucciuí, a mysterious creature that the adults used to scare the children to put them to sleep. The stories, ‘cause there are different versions of them, dealt with the Ciucciuí kidnapping the children who weren't in bed at night, taking them to his huge and scary nest, from which they couldn't escape. All of us were absolutely sure we heard his voice, at least once, but none of us could be ever be able of recall how it sounded. None of us had ever seen the creature, it had been living for years in the children's memories in multiple forms, changing its appearance every time through the eyes of one of us. Is it possible to have memories of something you can't surely say it exists? Can you believe that something exists, without having the proof? This work was born out of the need to reconstruct a fragmented memory, in order to create a new one where it doesn't exist, to fulfill a visual and acoustic gap through an improvised use of scientific research instruments and new technologies. Video surveillance, microphotography, infrared, 3d scanning, photographic cataloging of computer-generated evidence, come into contact with the family archive and with sound (generated from the images through software capable of transforming pixels into frequencies), in order to document a hidden reality that no one ever felt the need to prove to be truthful. “Ciucciuí” is a multisensorial investigation that doesn't aim at a specific instance - apart from the awareness that it's not important to find what you're looking for - rather the action of looking itself; one that never stops and continuously changes, together with us and our memory. In “Ciucciuì” not only photography is a tool for the investigation of a hidden reality, but it also has a cathartic role: it can exorcise a childhood fear, by giving form and image to something which was shapeless and obscure and due to that, terrifying.

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