During august Neopolitan dance comapny CORNELIA visit ccap for a residency surrounding PUCUNDRIA, a project choreographed by Nyko Piscopo.
The residency is part of an ongoing artistic exchange where the company is given opportunity to deepen their work through being mentored by cc.

Choreography Nyko Piscopo
Music design Gōreme
Set design / Vincenzo Fiorillo e Paolo Iammarone
Dance / Eleonora Greco, Nicolas Grimaldi Capitello, Leopoldo Guadagno, Francesco Russo
Production / Cornelia
Partner / ccap, IIC Stoccolma, Teatro della Tosse, Fondazione Armuni
With support from / SIAE – Art Bonus; Boarding Pass Plus 2025/2027

This work stems from a personal need: to question my relationship with the city I come from and with the cultural imagery that runs through it.
I was born in Naples, a complex and stratified city that is often described through partial and stereotyped representations. On one hand, there is a folkloric narrative that reduces Neapolitan culture to a caricatured dimension of spontaneity and excess; on the other, news coverage and media discourse tend to focus exclusively on problematic aspects related to crime and social hardship. Both of these perspectives risk obscuring a deeper dimension of Neapolitan cultural identity: an emotional sensitivity, almost subterranean, that permeates the way people live, perceive time, and inhabit space. The project PUCUNDRIA* arises precisely from the desire to bring this less visible dimension to light, using the language of the stage and the body as tools of investigation.

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Nyko Piscopo

BIO

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Pucundria: An Untranslatable Feeling

The word pucundria, belonging to the Neapolitan lexicon, refers to a state of mind that is difficult to define precisely. It describes a form of diffuse melancholy that blends sadness, restlessness, and a slight sense of emotional disorientation. It is not simply sadness nor nostalgia; rather, it is a suspended inner condition, a kind of gentle melancholy that moves through the body and the mind without any apparent cause.
From an etymological point of view, the term is generally traced back to the Greek hypochondrios, a word that indicated the area “below the ribs.” In ancient medicine, it was believed that certain forms of melancholy originated in that region of the body due to imbalances of the humors. From this root also derives the term “hypochondria,” which over the centuries has acquired a specific medical meaning.