Flavia Ripa
Flavia Ripa
echomaniac
About
I was born in Puglia but rarely go back, for personal reasons. Personal reasons that, slowly, are thinning out. Friends leave, sometimes family too. The bond with the land becomes something thought rather than felt — nostalgic at times, a metaphysical territory.
In recent years, Archiving Melpignano and Resistenze e Metabolizzazioni have been occasions to return to a familiar and unsettling land I left twenty years ago.In May 2026 I departed: from the noise of construction sites, from people seeking sustenance in the North, to the anarchic and despotic authority of the wind in Salento. A wind that scatters thoughts like hair — those thoughts that had been hiding behind cranes, behind arrows on rails rattling fast to carry us where we need to be."For that is what I am — a man of wind, who needs friction and momentum while walking, who needs, mid-sentence, to suddenly cry out, biting the air." — Calvino
Research
RESISTENZE E METABOLIZZAZIONI 2026The space that took shape in Melpignano, in 2022 first and again in 2026, is one of
research within a personal creative practice — one that moves through community
and questions itself. The self has no choice but to surrender to the other, so that
the other may define it — and in doing so, they define each other.
Here I experiment with the concept of creative freedom: feeling creative and free
from capitalising, capitalist definitions. From this approach — grounded in
meditative observation and a practice anchored to duration — a flower emerges
from the concrete of closed hearts. Not always. But it is a potential waiting for you.
"Who am I" no longer matters. "Who I have been" and "who I will be" exist
alongside "who we are".
This has given strong momentum to my multidisciplinary research, as I experiment
with video — in formats of documentation, narrative, or the simple use of image as
a synaesthetic instrument: not to signify, but to evoke — a flavour, a temperature, a
texture of time.
In this territory we walk not to get somewhere but to encounter: the bars, the
shutters, the people, the crossroads, the churches. In this practice, performativity
finds an anchor, a courage. The work proceeds by tasks; tasks establish a duration,
an order ready to be undone.
In 2022 my research turned toward the sacred and the profane — elements woven
into my life since childhood, finding fertile ground in Puglia, in the South in general.
In 2026 it moves toward a reflection on the masculine. On the awareness of a
power that drives us as human beings — men and women, all of us.
One of my oldest obsessions was a passage from The House of Liars. It is the voice
of Arturo's father, in an altercation with his companion — a vision of love and
women that spoke to me the way certain conversations did when I was a child,
stolen, overheard, wrested from the secrets of old men playing cards over a Raffo
(a beer from Taranto, born in 1919, bound to the city's working-class history, to the
Taranto of steel and the Ilva) and a game of scopone scientifico.
"The love of females, then, is the opposite of love! The intention of females is to
degrade life. That is what the legend of the Hebrews meant to say, in telling of the
expulsion from the Garden of Eden at a female's will. Were it not for females, our
destiny would not be to be born and to die, like beasts. The race of females hates
superfluous, undeserved things, is the enemy of all that has no limits... It wants
drama and sacrifice, that ugly race; it wants time, decay, slaughter, hope... it wants
death! Were it not for females, existence would be an eternal youth; a garden!
Everyone would be beautiful, free and carefree, and to love would mean only: to
reveal to one another how beautiful one is. Love would be a disinterested delight, a
perfect glory — like looking at oneself in a mirror; it would be... a natural
wickedness without remorse, like a marvellous hunt in a royal forest. True love is
like this: it has no purpose and no reason, and submits to no power other than
human grace. But the love of females is a servant of destiny, working to perpetuate
death and shame."
— Elsa Morante, The House of Liars
I try to make of my body a Territory. I try to make of my threads and traumas pages
that might concern others. Or perhaps this is only an artist's dream — to give the
Ego a "C" ( and a "H" just for english) and make of it a universal Echo.
VIDEO LINKS
My self self portrait Melpignano 2022
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Video Archive
Melpignano Artist ResidenciesA collection of videos — performances, free compositions, and documentation — created during the artistic residencies held in Melpignano, Salento, in 2022 and 2026. All works by Flavia Ripa.
KEVIN LASAGNA - Task Sound space transformer Resistenze e metabolizzazioni 2026
An Angel in the Square TASK ANGEL resistenze e metabolizzazioni 2026
Dance of the Knights - Task Learning from someone Resistenze e metabolizzazioni 2026
RECIPE-RAPE BOLLITE CON FAGIOLI - task Sound Town- video creation ARCHIVING MELPIGNANO 2022
HEAVEN - Task Heaven video creation ARCHIVING MELPIGNANO 2022
ROOTS/HOLY WAR - The failure of a search for the sacred within me video creation ARCHIVING MELPIGNANO 2022
SOUND TOWN-KARAOKE - Video creation ARCHIVING MELPIGNANO 2022
Who i am? Actress. Writer. Soundesigner. Guitarist. In no particular order.
I am not a filmmaker, nor a director. The video wants to work with me, when i'm in Melpignano.