Ciucciuì by Priscilla Pallante

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 childrens’ memories in multiple forms, changing its appearance every time through the eyes of one of us.
Is it possibile 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 fill a visual and acoustic gap through an improvised use of scientific research instruments and new technologies. “Ciucciuí” is a multi-sensorial 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. Lying between reality and fiction, it aims to underline how much a non written tale can be influenced by multiple voices and how much our imagination and memory can affect the shape of reality.
In the shape of the book, necessary to organize an oral tradition and its multiple voices in an object with its own materiality, in a physically present trace and document, the work has further changed. Transforming itself into a narrative flow in which the text represents at the same time a clue and a denial.
The words, extracted from different documents and voices, have been reorganized to produce a story that tends to change according to how it is read.
Different senses of reading are intertwined, in the text but also in the images, in a continuous operation of concealment and discovery.

128 pages
15 x 24 cm

Publisher: 89books