Claudi Piripippi

Claudi Piripippi makes work out of what doesn’t go quiet—grief, memory, names that stick, roles that don’t quite fit. Her collages, poems, and digital images feel pieced together from different states of being. Myth and biology sit side by side. So do shame and softness. She doesn’t offer a fixed version of herself, but lets things loop, glitch, repeat. The work carries personal symbols, handwritten lines, fragments from the body. Each piece feels like a return and a rewrite. A way to stay with what’s hard, without needing it to resolve.

Reiss Dich Zusammen (and let go) - Digital collage, 2023

Q: Your work turns inward, digging through personal chaos. When did that shift start for you?

A: On the day of my 52nd bday I tattooed my wrists: "Piripippi" on the left, in his handwriting, and "Claudi" on the right, in my own handwriting. Yes, it was a clear shift marked by the passing of Rinaldo, my beloved stepfather. His death birthed the interacting poems and the renaming of myself.

In retrospect, it had been a whole rite of passage for which I bathed myself in writing. Poems such as "Blue", "Un Cappuccino e una Brioche", "Ciao", "Authenticity", "Smile", are the inheritance of his love. The urge to metabolise my relationship to him and to myself are perhaps most obvious in "Claudi" and "Piripippi", poems that express the desire for transformation and connection.

Having picked up on my fondness for Pippi Longstocking's rebellious non-conforming spirit, Rinaldo nicknamed me Piripippi. Claudi, instead, is the name I chose to claim my authentic self back. I wanted to honour both. These little rituals have helped the mourning process but also signed the entering in a new season.

Prior to that, strong instincts and intuition kept me afloat guiding me across the fogs of unconscious, even if hypersensitive, living. I was trained to hover, dismiss pain and keep fear well tucked like in a soldier’s chest — only my chest unproudly sinking down instead. After years of polite smiling to please, cheering to ignore depression, avoid the past, I eventually met art. A shy introduction, that was. Never been to an art museum, only Italian churches, I had no clue about contemporary art and even less so on how to make it.

Only when I saw Tracey Emin’s unmade bed at the Turner Prize in London in 1998, did I feel stirred, the hidden mess rising up. I recognised the truth of my own chaos — a close-up of my shame on display, mirrored out — out there — I felt represented, and that moved me inside.

Tentatively — one little step after the other, bouncing back and forth, concentrically skimming off strata, I am hoping to spiral towards the core. But crafting rebirth is a painstakingly slow dance. One foot forward and two back, often standing on the same old spot before sliding a tiny bit inwards. To make an indent across historical layers of calcified automatisms, and most importantly cut one's own umbilical cord off, is a tough, time-consuming job requiring magical tools and superhuman techniques — witchcraft helps!

I am emotionally codependent from a dysfunctional structure, the patriarchy so deeply embedded in me does not easily wash off, especially the well-patterned knot with my mother and with societal conditioning. This is what Rinaldo revealed and confronted me with — by leaving — me alone in the dig.

Moving country, separations, Covid, death, divorce, my mum’s breast mastectomy, discovering her well-concealed mental disorder, becoming her sole caregiver — hey, what more do you need to pick up the signs?

Amplified by the current existential social-environmental crisis, ignored wounds are bleeding all over. But living in the death bubble can also provide a space for experimenting with growth. “C’mon Claudi, unravel the skein and get to know who is who: the conditioned and the authentic, the past and the present.”

At the moment this soul-searching path seems to be the only viable direction.

Q: In collages like "Reiss dich zusammen (and let go)", you blend myth, biology, and tech. How do these elements find their rhythm together?

A: I don’t exactly know, but I sense a connection between these elements, subtle energetic vibrations that communicate life-forming weavings. Myth, biology and technology, a networked texture that like jellyfish tentacles flows the sea’s conductivity and its undercurrent watery nervous systems.

So the rhythm might be marked by the sea — encompassing the real and the metaphorical, the sacred and the mundane. By desire — for more fluidity to root deeper into earth. By technology — wandering the digital to escape the world and paradoxically get closer to nature (via the inflation of simulacra). By the blue — that waves me inside, emotions ink-jetted out on a screen. By need — for plant cosmologies and for metamorphosis to abrupt predestined toxic role models. By effort — to truly feel, try out, test, touch, handle the wound. By healing — implied by the oppositional movement of the work’s title: pull yourself together and let go. By the imaginal — for a tailor-made mythological archetype to be discovered. By potential — for authentic wholeness of self.

The digital collages are a sort of DIY technological embodiment confronting my limitations. They sprouted out of guilt, obligation, anger and most likely shame as well. These feelings I expressed digitally. Symbolic meanings, collaged with images of parts of my mother’s and my own body, depict a gelatinous emotional realm. Fear and love are visually reproduced by thin, rather invisible, but sticky tissue. Digital cellular layers form a membrane that divides myth from archetype, exterior from interior, indicating that underneath there lies a pulsing organism: the inner child — a sacred entity still in dear need for validation — an open wound waiting to be discovered and cared for culturally, biologically, socially, environmentally, technologically, at an individual as well as collective level

You Are Not In My Scream!  - Digital collage, 2023

Q: Your interactive poems invite people to respond out loud. What made you want to turn language into a shared, physical experience?

A: As mentioned earlier on, the interactive poems are a precious inheritance. They are what death, divorce, a socially engaged MFA and moving country passed down to me: the call for personal transformation.

An alchemical necessity that of contacting the subconscious and becoming aware through the exploration of pain and self — could this vibrational intention create a humble, but also joyful, ripple? Affect my immediate surroundings? A small field for social engagement, that is.

Since graduating from Suzanne Lacy’s Public Practice MFA, I have been searching for my own socially engaged way to make art, a more intimate one in tune with my personality and upbringing, with my artist skills of connecting and communicating.

Words make up 7% of all communication, body language 93%. To use John Diamond’s words, the body does not lie and in Bessel van der Kolk’s it also keeps the score, so we need body language to discern the truth. The interactive poems aim at using words to reconnect to the state of our body that has been conditioned since childhood, first by parents, then by society.

Also a pretext to create a context for exchange of energetic inputs, the interactive poems are a call for a two-way sharing. 

In one direction offer out — risking the personal, my experience all I really have. And on the other invite in — asking help, for attention and participation, for the correspondence of the audience’s bodies. By producing movement, tone and vibration, this relational situation forms a participatory emotional space where I try to balance individualism with collectivism, personal with political. Can the engagement in playful performative acts of communication wedge a healthy communal moment in the inward of my/our confinement?

I’m still working on how to best spark the emotional dialogue, involve the audience, get in touch with each other’s vulnerabilities — how to best de-objectify the word, express feelings to form images out of embodied words.

Q: You dig into inherited systems — cultural, familial, political. What does resistance look like in your creative process?

A: Mundane moments of environmental consciousness: cooking, cleaning, eating, living; needing less, energy saving, consuming only what’s truly necessary produces pleasure and beauty. This erotic environmental awareness is my main form of income, a rewarding activity I see as a job and a creative form of resistance. From washing my hands, my hair, my body, washing clothes, washing dishes, cleaning the house, using detergents or domestic appliances, shopping or driving, I am very careful about wasting: electricity, heating, petrol, water, paper, food, plastics. Passed down from my grandmother and my mother, from World War Two scarcity, these set of values connect me to earth, to my feminine, to my mothers and to the sacredness of life. Thrifty and essential, this mindset manifests aesthetically in video and performance artworks where I portrayed the role of the housewife whilst running parallels between housekeeping, domestic economy, eco-feminism and sustainable living.

But becoming — my authentic self — is, I believe, my most ambitious attempt of resistance: dismantle, in bell hooks’ words, the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy inside of me.

Repetitive, mental gists overlap the actions we daily perform over and over since childhood, giving (or taking) meaning and purpose. As I am sorting, reordering, stripping, decluttering my past, little piles accumulate — my internal space looking like a logistic hub. The mess of symbols, images and words are waiting to be edited by a better sense of self and be redistributed by an awakened awareness. The way, the tool, the frame, the practice, the witchcraft of cleansing, of letting go, of lightening up all meet in art and in the poetic of a relational aesthetic of interdependence. All about love — it is bell hooks that also introduced me to Alice Miller’s pioneering research. Her books on the trauma of being a child have enlightened me on how codependence from our unhealthy familial systems perpetuates the bondage of oppression. So here we go, another domestic activity. Resistance starts at home. But then again it takes a village to raise a child, the inner one included!

Q: From jellyfish to roots to digital frequencies, your work maps a kind of eco-spiritual web. Where does your art fit in that network?

A: What a beautiful question, it brings up tears. I wish I could say that it fits in spiritual activism, but I am not there yet. So for now, like driftwood, or more like a morbid plastic bag, my work, or anything I do, sways in the blue of ocean currents that entangle the earth of its abysses with the silence of cosmic starry rainbows.

Q: Naming, coding, undoing — these come up a lot. What’s one label you’ve broken that shifted your practice?

A: I feel that rather than breaking out of codes and labels one swishes in and out of them with the passing of time. Having said that I am always trying to break out of something! Shedding Claudia for Claudi felt surprisingly empowering, a feeling I had not expected nor have ever experienced before. My new name feels so beautifully smooth inside, to hear and also very natural to say out loud, it makes me proud. It embodies my becoming: a Fluid Queer Eco Glitch Feminist Artist, Red Resonant Serpent trying to grow feathers, a Tadpole under the spell of the planets, especially influenced by Saturn, Neptune, Pluto and Uranus, and I almost forgot Mars, oh my!!

It’s been interesting to notice who embraced my new name, sharing the journey, somehow transforming together with me, and who could not adapt to the change.

I think everybody should give it a go at naming themselves, pick how they’d like to be addressed. Very often naming done by others box us in, while the naming of self can box us out. The former give us a passive voice, the latter an active one. Having said that some labels have helped me broaden my horizon, open up my thinking. Labels such as artist, feminist, fluid, glitch, gave me strength and inspiration, they have helped better understand myself and my positionality navigating diversity.

Allow me to finish off with a Gloria Anzaldúa’s quote on identity that really resonates:

“I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds, Gloria, the facilitator, Gloria, the mediator, straddling the walls between abysses. 'Your allegiance is to La Raza, the Chicano movement,' say the members of my race. 'Your allegiance is to the Third World,' say my Black and Asian friends. 'Your allegiance is to your gender,' say the feminists. Then there’s my allegiance to the Gay movement, to the socialist revolution, to the New Age, to magic and the occult. And there’s my affinity to literature, to the world of the artist. What am I? A third world lesbian feminist with Marxist and mystic leanings. They would chop me up into little fragments and rag each piece with a label.

You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and -legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man’s world, the women’s, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web.

Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.”

— Gloria Anzaldúa, La Prieta, 1981

¹ I like to thank theatre artist pico-astrologist Lauretta Dal Cin, who spiritually guided me whilst introducing me to the world of mythology and astrology — and also theatre. It was in fact Lauretta’s vision that embarked me on an interdisciplinary collaborative project for which she translated a selection of my early interactive poems and directed them into a theatre piece I performed together with actress Elena Spadola. This experience enriched my art practice and my confidence in the poems.

2 Dr. Corrine Stoewsand work on DBT beautifully explains the importance of validation.

³ Kenny Weiss in Your Journey in Finding Yourself, outlines the importance to heal from the past to become responsible adults and parents so to stop the perpetuating of trauma.

 ⁴ I like to credit Verónica Reyes’ poem Panocha Power, published in Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from bordered lives. I witnessed her performing that poems many times where she involves the     audience asking to shout the word “Power” at every line ending with the word “Panocha”. I now realise how influential that powerful poem was. 

⁵ Pia Mellody artfully explains the dynamics of codependence. 

⁶ I like to thank Dr. AnaLouise Keating, professor of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas, for introducing me to this quote during her Morbid Anatomy class on Gloria Anzaldúa.