Claudi Piripippi

Your education:
2013 – 2015 OTIS College for Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA, USA. MFA Public Practice with Suzanne Lacy. Thesis: From the Rabbit Hole You Make the Rules! A creative exploration of eco-feminism.
2002 – 2005 Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media & Design, London Metropolitan University, UK. BFA Fine Art (Hons). Specialisation: Sculpture. Senior Thesis: The Adventures of a Little Plastic Bag; an illustrated story for children and adults.
1993 – 1998 Universita degli Studi di Genova, Italy. BA in Languages and Literature (English and German). Specialisation: American History. Senior Thesis with Professor Valeria Gennaro Lerda: Black Education in the South of the States 1855 – 1950: The Case of South Carolina. Three months research at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.
Describe your art in three words: COM, PLEX, ITY.
Your discipline: COMPLEXITY.
Website

Claudi Piripippi | I am not in your scream

Can you tell us more about how your multicultural upbringing in Germany and Italy has influenced your artistic vision?

Born in Germany, I was raised by a single mother in Italy. I was 3 years old when we moved to Piedmont. My father is from the Italian Alps region. He met my mother in the heydays of the 60s at a popular seaside tourist resort on the Ligurian Riviera, the same village we relocated to with my stepfather Rinaldo just before I left home in 1988. Ironically, also where I am currently living after coming back in 2019.

Escaping traumas for warmth, sun, and beauty, my mother (and I) roamed nations, regions, towns, villages, and people’s homes before settling. In 70s small-town Italy, my mother was an exotic catch: a beautiful Nordic woman with an indelible accent — and, with a Prussian upbringing: that — she passed onto me. Newly divorced (in Italy, divorce was legalized in 1974), she was an outcast struggling for survival in a family-oriented patriarchal tradition, and I was her cute blonde daughter — or sister — as they would compliment her, or me, or us, I don’t really know.

With a single parent who spoke broken Italian, initially more of a local dialect, I grew up bilingual in a German household set in an Italian cultural context. Imagine a ricoperto: a thin chocolate crust on the outside with vanilla ice cream on the inside. Or better, imagine an affogato al caffè: German on the inside, Italian on the outside, or is it the other way around? Never mind, a frozen meltdown. My mother’s priority was to keep the surface uncracked, all energy invested in the function of appearing cool, the mess inside all nicely covered up by a plastic exterior.

An exodus from the artificial, a female searching for her natural, authentic truth, I have been running away from Italy’s most used adjective — bella — and from the mentality of seduction. Nonetheless, the aesthetics of provincial conventions, of a one-sided, uniform concept of beauty, had already been embedded: both Lutheran and Catholic aesthetic values seeking to complement each other’s opposites inside of me.

But the binaries do not end here. A FIAT assembly line working-class heritage, operai from my father’s side, and a military middle class from my mother’s—these other two cultural extremes met in my parents’ conservative ideology—the righteous one that believes in economics over education, economics über alles—and, of course, in the historic alliance of slippery World War II fronts. Attraction and repulsion, hate and love carrying the ugly burden of the past. The forgotten generation, as Sabine Bode defined the children of that war, their duty was to brush all violence under the carpet, to suck it up in the name of prosperity.

So I fled—subconsciously, I fled in my dream, not even knowing I had one. I fled to the land of art, my work a game of contradictions where I play with the tensions that inhabit my world. With one root in the German city and the other in the Italian rural, I’m a nomadic local foreigner. Culturally never truly belonging anywhere yet perfectly fitting in the ephemeral, natural realm of human impermanence, where we all stem out of as cities creating villagers.

Making art in the flow of resisting while hoping to resolve the opposites, either by creating contrast or harmony, I am a dysfunctional human being trying to perfect my world. Barely coping with diversity—oops, diversities—secretly desiring control, the control I was taught is the magic solution for achieving happiness, I explore the facade of illusionary harmony. Not detailed, overall general rather than analytical, my outlook is a site-specific landscape picture pixelated with Italian dramatic playfulness and German environmental existentialism.

How did your academic experiences in Genoa, London, and Los Angeles shape your approach to art?

A BA in foreign literature at Genoa University teased out a desire to actively create rather than be a passive receiver of art. I wanted to experience the making of something myself, or even dare to represent myself! I wanted a taste of empowerment, emancipation, and ownership through the responsibility of freedom. Plus, my thesis on racial issues with American history professor Valeria Gennaro Lerda had set me on the path of social engagement and prepared me for US geo-socio-politics.

The need to break away from the patriarchal provincial indoctrination of my imagination is a feeling I could only word after my MFA in Los Angeles. While Genoa educated me in formal patriarchal academia, London opened me up to the magic grounds of experimenting with freedom, calibrating ideas with materials, concepts with responsibility. Los Angeles, instead, was all about politics, feminism, social engagement, and glitching my edges—finding my own fluidity and my spirituality.

Claudi Piripippi | Blow me away if you can!

Your work with recycled plastic bags is fascinating. What inspired you to use this unconventional material, and how does it connect to your environmental concerns?

First of all, I am the daughter of a pathological hoarder, a serial accumulator who collects stuff to fill the void of unhealed trauma. Then, the nothing-can-be-wasted domestic economy mentality, passed on to me not just by my mother but also by my Italian grandmother, is deeply seated in me and mingles with a German romantic environmental sensibility.

A DNA that was triggered by living a wasteful lifestyle in 90s London. At that time, traveling the world—especially the Middle East, where a Western consumerist lifestyle (but not the infrastructure to process the excess of capitalism) had been imported—prompted me to look into the debris that has been colonizing our natural landscapes. I played with all sorts of rubbish and discarded materials before landing on recycled plastic bags. Ubiquitously flimsy, ephemerally eternal, I saw in plastic bags the symbol of my contradictory and hypocritically sublime Western lifestyle.

How has your itinerant lifestyle and exposure to diverse landscapes influenced the themes and aesthetics of your art?

Walking the line of imagination, between realities and potentials, has crafted a hypersensitivity to space and place, to the relationship between object and subject, life and matter, form and content: to the relationship of self and nature and of selves and environment — in the end, the true themes behind the scenes being connection and love. All my works are inspired by nature, without which nothing would exist, not even the tensions caused by capitalist culture. As for aesthetics, I mess around with the concepts of monoculture beauty, testing my boundaries of understanding and accepting diversity while discovering that whatever I would come up with already exists in nature. Mostly, it’s an exercise of decluttering, of trying to simplify to find balance between the opposites. In other words, it is an aesthetic of instability or, better, of false stability, because equilibrium is a precarious condition to achieve and maintain.

Claudi Piripippi | Plastic scream

Can you share the most meaningful experience from one of your A.I.R. programs, and how it contributed to your artistic journey?

Most of them brought me closer to nature. Discovering the great North American landscapes and other amazing places has inspired and challenged my work to become more “ambitious,” if not just in scale. I also met amazing people with whom I collaborated or became lifelong friends, such as choreographer Nina Haft, artists Laura Scandrett and Kathy Marsh. At Vermont Studios, I met poet Verónica Reyes, a crush that led to a marriage and a green card and introduced me to my fluidity, to feminism, to contemporary poetry, to Chicana lesbian literature, to Los Angeles, to Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, and Audre Lorde, and much more. Thanks to Verónica, I was able to truly grasp and get a visceral understanding of race, class, gender, and sex struggles and how these intersect with social and environmental justice.

The end of our relationship opened me up to a new body of work. The interactive poems are definitely inspired by Verónica’s Panocha Power! Subliminally incubating, our exchange mingling all along with my literature, sculptural, and social engagement studies, these various influences matured in what seems obvious only now. Multi-genres, a hybrid of creative writing, relational aesthetics, social engagement, poetry slam, performance art, spoken word, concrete poetry, visual typography, digital collage—the interactive poems are a sort of mixed media interdisciplinary experimental art seeking the meeting point between the sacred and the conceptual, the personal and the political. They are a liminal visual narrative that soulfully attempts to capture the essence of self while navigating the boundaries of well-being between natural and ideal, between intimacy and communality.

Receiving prestigious awards like the Joan Mitchell Grant and the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Grant is a significant achievement. How have these recognitions impacted your career?

Mostly, they have impacted me economically, giving me the possibility to focus on my art practice and develop my artistic research. A financial relief from worrying about making ends meet, combined with a formal official acknowledgment, is an incredible boost that encouraged me to keep going, to hang in there through the difficulties of being an artist that works outside the mainstream circuits of the gallery system. In my lowest moments, I look back at these awards for courage, for strength, for perseverance, for confidence, for validation, for trust in my abilities and artistic expression.

Claudi Piripippi | Pescheterian Blues

Your work often integrates radical feminist themes and eco-glitch femininity. Can you elaborate on these concepts and how they manifest in your art?

Initially introduced to me by Verónica Reyes and then developed thanks to professors Suzanne Lacy, Andrea Bowers, Annetta Kapon, Kathrine Burmeister, Renée Petropoulos, Dana Duff, Patrisse Cullors, Janaya Khan, and many others, I furthered my Public Practice MFA research all the way to eco-feminism, also thanks to curator Jennifer Heath. I see feminism in quantum and sacred terms as the great goddess holding the yin and yang, the feminine and masculine energies in balance within. The glitch part is inspired by Legacy Russell and refers not only to my glitchy DIY approach to digital technology but also to my imperfections as a human being—a feminist, a lover, an environmentalist, a daughter, an artist, a queer.

For Legacy Russell, glitch is a cyberspace for growth, a liminal ground of freedom and therefore potential. For me, the glitch is also the crack between nature and technology, the glitch is the overlooked, the cracks in between time, the glitch is where our subconscious resides, where our souls thrive. Overall, feminism is a mindset, a lens through which I filter the world entering me. Encompassing life and art, public and private, it’s a holistic viewpoint that recognizes the intersectionality of our interconnectedness.

During my MFA in Los Angeles, my art practice shifted from installation to performance and video art. It was a natural intuitive transition, also encouraged by my feminist professors who had either planted the seed or saw the potential in my seed. Whichever way, it was an exciting realm to explore and experiment in—a kinder ground, free from patriarchal rules, from patriarchal virtuosity, impossible to judge and compare because it is slippery, not an object to hold on to, but life passing through.

Then, as I mentioned before, a series of coincidences, or synchronicities—the divorce, COVID, moving back to Italy, the death of my beloved stepfather—led to a new beginning, to a new body of work: the interactive poems.

While I thank you for your questions, for your attention, and for the opportunity to share my practice, I like to end this interview with a statement that summarizes the interactive poems, and also with a wish: may these paragraphs trigger the radical eco-glitch-feminist in you!

By unraveling the layers of multiple identities—the archetypical, biological, political, geo-socio-cultural—the interactive poems are an excavation of the natural and artificial formations of my being to get to the inner soul that connects me to you through words that, traveling in and out of the selves, like the wind, carry and carve meaning, forming our imaginal.

Intersecting time, language, and image to multiple layers of consciousness and therefore of “I’s,” I invite the participant to an exploratory journey to unfold (discover and contest) the power dynamics that mold us. In my case, the socio-cultural conditioning enforced on me by my mother—another victim of the perverted, pervasive, perpetuated patriarchal system—silently and invisibly clashes with my authentic and unique potential. Her controlling rules and regulations challenge my being to this day. My role as a child, daughter, female, queer, artist, successful failure, white European, aging woman—who still has to resolve their relationship to their roots, their ancestry, and above all, to their mother: the biological, the metaphorical, and the spiritual one—roots back into patriarchal mythology.

Non-trusting of men, my unresolved feminine still fights to come to terms with the values of Western capitalist society that are so deeply embedded inside me. Words as images, images as emotions—how does my water run through you? How do we choose our signs? How does my experience interact with yours and with that of the Earth? A sort of words’ ceremonial—praying for the word to signify the truth—past and present come together through the collective performative action of the interactive poems, hoping to reconnect emotions to the earth of our bodies.