Words by Karolina Wiśniewska
What draws me to Luigi Ghirri’s photograph for CCCP’s Epica Etica Etnica Pathos is what it brings together: a former chapel has become a recording and mixing room where speakers stand before the altar, cables spread across the floor, and technical equipment occupies a space once organised around ritual - creating a new ritual. It is a tender image of a sacred place transformed into another holy place.
The album was recorded at Villa Pirondini, an abandoned eighteenth-century country house near Rio Saliceto, with the musicians using the building’s natural acoustics rather than the controlled environment of a conventional studio. The architecture therefore became an active condition [to] music making. Its rooms, surfaces and echoes became part of the sound. Ghirri’s photograph makes that relationship visible without illustrating it literally. To me, this is the essence of Ghirri’s photography: an extraordinary ability to give a sound and a taste to emptiness. It’s a 101 class on philosophy of architecture; understanding how space is shaped by use and histories, in this case being a reactivatation of a dead building. Remarkable considering how quiet the photograph is, a portrait of a band without any members of the band present.