Text by Sara Poli
All Images © Eleonora Paciullo
Eleonora Paciullo is an Italian artist and co-founder of the publishing house The Light Observer. Her artistic work revolves around installations combining photography, video performance and sculpture, exploring how individual narratives and collective memory evolve and intertwine over time. With this in mind, she reflects on the idea of stratification and transformation, questioning the way in which a narrative is recorded, preserved and restituted. Her latest project, Theophanies, won the 2024 Polyptyque Prize in Marseille and was selected and exhibited during the 10th edition of the Ghirri Prize in Reggio Emilia. In 2022, she was nominated for the COTM Alula residency, and her project Almar’a, created during the residency, was exhibited at COTM 2022. In 2021, her project Do you want to go and live where it’s always sunny was showcased at the Circulation(s) festival in Paris and was published in 6mois, Dype OFF, and Ph Museum.
Artist Eleonora Paciullo, deeply attached to her homeland, Calabria, reconstructs stories and legends of Locri, the “magical place of my childhood”. In this work, called Teofanie, one can see attempts to retrace ancient ideologies or religious liturgies that belonged to the pagan world of southern Italy. The author retraces this construction using fragments of truths that do not stop at a single source: through the stories of the elders, the vast photographic archives of the National Archaeological Museum, and by traversing the sacred areas of Locri Epizephyrii, she attempts to reconstruct a visual compendium on the ancient knowledge connected to this geographical area, once chosen to celebrate Persephone and Athena, a place where the Sapphic poetess Nossis was worshipped, as evidenced by her statue in front of the sea. Driven by this strong sense of appearance and eager to bring these social practices back to light, the artist attempts to reconstruct ancient knowledge through an oral, handed-down point of view and an archival-historical one. All this research led her to create a final part of the project that developed into performances: “[…] these performances reflect my quest to unite past and present, to merge childhood memories with the current reality of this place. They embody the synthesis between Locri’s heritage and my contemporary interpretation, interweaving like the threads of a tapestry where memories and reality merge.”
With these images, the artist shows us fragments of rituals in audiovisual form along with natural elements, often channeled by her own presence: she seems to guide us with an enchanting, hypnotic attitude in devout gestures to show us practices developed by the ancients for apotropaic purposes or related to the cycles of nature. Materialized by her own body, these gestures are often demonstrated as fragments of visual conjunction, verging on the eschatological and spiritual theme, shown here with the frame of nature, its materials, and landscapes surrounding these places. The theme of modeling, touching, and interacting with certain material objects makes us think of the artist’s desire to recreate this ancient history through the reality of the material itself, which becomes tangible creating an empirical bridge between the world of the past and the present of this work of her. What makes these images extremely refined and vocative lies in their phenomenology: they do not recount a final or official moment of the sacred, the representative one, but rather the time that stops at the center, the time it takes to prepare for it, leaving us in an extremely intimate preliminary moment of courtly and extremely delicate suspension. The choice to take the viewer through a process of finalizing the ritual makes us feel an even more eternal sense of these practices as an endless succession of liturgies, where the process “of the whole” was as important and sacred as their final achievement. Of interest is how the theme of theophany, in this work, does not follow the classical “manifestation of divinity” as the etymological meaning of the word suggests, but rather an internal divine manifestation that permeates in his present memory, carrying this distant knowledge, now brought to light. The artist’s deep connection to this place is now indulged in her visual testimony, a deep connection that starts from the earth, water, and fauna. Eleonora Paciullo once again weaves a bond that becomes biological, now earthly, now well-grounded, also thanks to the use of reference texts such as Calvin’s Fables, The Greek Religion of Archaic and Classical Times, Walter Burkert, Byung Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rites, and The Dancing God Paolo Pecere as well as the vast archives and documents she researched. As an archaic telluric goddess, Eleanora intersects her body in mystery rites, transcending her first ancient now contemporary identity as Greek initiatory rites remind us to reach, through this knowledge, the epòptai or “those who possess the vision,” the awakened.
