NOBODY’S TALES

Take your time.

Once you’re done, leave the book open on the title page.

There is no definitive point in Nobody’s tales / I racconti di nessuno by LeleMarcojanni, a multimedia book that stands between a filmic work and an exhibition display. This is an experiment started four years ago by the collective following an invitation that urged it to join the work in progress for Scirocco, a residency, in Apulia region, Southern Italy. Scirocco is a wind, so capricious and fickle, and it lashed for two weeks on the headquarters, in Taranto, wreaking havoc on the streets and pushing everyone to find shelter within the walls of the Old City to think about publishing, self-production practices, artist’s books. What is in front of you inherits the form of those reflections, but only in part: because today Nobody’s Tales / I racconti di nessuno is presented as an interactive installation, which hybridizes the narrative function of a literary work with the filmic one. In the work, dialogues, camera movements, texts, real and fictional elements come together in a multimedia book to browse. The editing of the film is dictated by the spectator’s reading rhythm, whose decisions affect the sense of the story. Time is the main protagonist of the chapter on Taranto which draws on the oral heritage as the main element in the construction of a community and its imaginary. A soundscape hatched by Glauco Salvo and Gaspare Sammartano, researchers on sounds and field recordings, it accompanies the vision of Taranto, in Southern Italy, with its rhythms, its urban and natural landscapes, a report that prevents itself from falling into exoticism or front page rhetoric. In Nobody’s Tales the dramaturgy of the story is built from original passages, written by Lele Marcojanni; and from oral transcripts, nursery rhymes, quotations from the Apocryphal Gospels or from the pages of Calvino or Agamben: everything contributes to build the flow of a story that, due to its discretion and nature, would hardly meet the attention of an audience. It establishes an intimate relationship, with the reader: Nobody’s Tales is to be read alone. It also makes a point on the authorial retreat in the practice of filmmaking. It therefore looks like a long term project in which it will be difficult to set an end. In the collective’s planning, the collection of its chapters is in fact destined to grow and to experience exhibition possibilities that require the viewer / reader to have an attitude that is anything but contemplative towards the moving image.

The second chapter, here presented as a draft, is focused on the theme of identity, on the us/them rethoric so symbolically inscripted in the divided capital city of Cyprus, Nicosia; so particular yet universal. To present itself to the public, the book creates a dialogue with environments, where it will adapt to places and times to highlight the souls of the spaces by opening up to the suggestions of guests who cross the space. LeleMarcojanni will be there to listen to them, elusive and shy. Like a wind.

Nobody’s tales is a work in progress. It will connect different points in the Mediterranean by telling stories of different places. Focusing on contemporary issues, like a tales collector, Lele Marcojanni will pursue a counter-narrative of connection of a sea that the media insist on depicting as a border.