If it is true that essays explain things, and it is true that novels make things understand, it is also true in the same way that the landing point of a podcast is its dual narrative soul, the one that allows you to have a sentimental access and also a synthetic shortcut, where synthesis and feeling are two glances that pertain to conversations about the future, in which languages are contaminated and perform specular but not perpendicular functions.
With this moral, dutiful exergue, we trace the arrival point of a podcast that has taken on a significant responsibility: to carry out a complete reconnaissance, a reconstruction as perhaps has never been carried out, of a story that recently celebrated thirty years since its tragic beginningand which had misdirections and flaws, which made its drafting a complex challenge.
We’re talking about Where Nobody’s Looking, the original podcast by Sky Italia e SkyTg24 created by Chora Media about the history of Elisa Clapswritten by Riccardo Spagnoli, Alessia Rafanelli e Pablo Trinciawith the theme song, music and sound design by Michele Boreggi.
Where no one looks: Pablo Trincia’s podcast
Where Nobody Looks tells the story of Elisa Claps and takes us to Poweril September 12, 1993. Elisa Claps is sixteen years old, she attends the third year of classical high school, she has three older brothers and two loving parents, Filomena Lemma e Antonio Claps. On the morning of that Sunday 12 September, Elisa left the house to go to church, the church of the Holy Trinity, together with a friend to meet Danilo Restivo, a friend who was supposed to give her a gift to celebrate her promotion to the remedial exams. From that moment on, no trace of her was lost.
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Elisa Claps’ story is a painful one, full of misdirections, obsessions, investigative errors, deafening silences, and has become a truly complex news story. Pablo Trincia manages to unravel the knots of this story, giving the listener the profile of the story, which thrives on dark abysses, on artificial and misleading liesabove all it gives a very clear image of who Danilo Restivo was, a man who had the habit of annoying girls, secretly cutting locks of hair with a pair of scissors, of following them, of annoying them with disturbing night calls, behaviors that then led to the death of two women: Elisa Claps ed Eather Barnett. The case of Elisa Claps is now well known: her body was found in 2010 in the attic of the Church of the Holy Trinity, right there, where no one has ever looked.
From Poison to Where Nobody Looks
What is not known, and which has remained unchanged in these thirty years, is the truth, or how it is possible that a body remained in that attic all this time, how much Don Mimì Sabia, then parish priest of the church, was involved, how many have seen and heard and have never spoken. Until today we have had the chance to nail the killer, with difficulty. Now everything else remains to be discovered.
After the beautiful podcasts Veleno and Il dito di Dio, Trincia has accustomed us to a superlative narrative quality. What Pablo Trincia has composed, together with his authors, is a writing of reality that bases its narrative strength both on the precise and lucid testimonies of the Claps family, and on the words of the journalists who followed the story, both in its English declination and Italian, both of the forensic casts that Trincia has skilfully woven into the story.
What Trincia does, which in short is the most detonating power that holds back the podcast medium, is to use the word as a blunt instrument, precisely because the writing stays true to what it sees; Trincia fits into a contemporary, symbolic framework, and draws a line between narrator and narrated which, in a context like this – in which writing has a contingency of news – means maintaining, acting as a bridge between yesterday and today, an exercise in re-appropriation and belonging which takes on a very high value.
A context and its contradictions
Where Nobody Looks already holds in its title a posture, a precise intention, that is, to fill a narrative void and a silence that has continued in all these years, in which this story has been kept, perhaps, deliberately at a very low volume , in which it was given little consideration and discussed only in a few investigative situations. Where Nobody Looks starts from an observation, that is, if it is politics that shapes social language, the politics of silence certainly shapes a doctrine, a doctrine that has caused a social dullness, a dialectical fixity: the story of Elisa Claps is a story that rests its distortions and its leaden folds in a social context that must clash with its contradictions.
If we can find a function for this podcast, not because it is necessary but because it is true, it is to have had access to a narrative that has been deprived of its authority, deprived of its truth and its power, which is now here, present, and which needed someone with the desire and desire to remember that every story deserves to be told.
What this podcast allows us to do is to land inside a lived text, which changes those who listen to it, with an epistemic effectiveness that in a certain sense redefines the role of listening dogmatized as passive. We are faced with a form of expression in which journalism, and therefore mediation, distils a game of reciprocity with feelings, which can generate embarrassment but never does. Where Nobody Looks is a prismatic podcast, because it manages to go beyond the intentio operis, taking its listeners almost by surprise as it finds in them meanings of which, perhaps, the writer was unaware.
Where no one is looking: a podcast can make a difference
It is no coincidence that this podcast is generating forms of civil resistance which, up until now, had never been seen in this sense in Potenza; it is no coincidence that listening groups have been organised, moments in which the community had to giving up his dark laxity to look each other in the eyes and understand that together with the boundless and immeasurable pain of a family there is a collective trauma that has never been interpreted or processed.
What it is generating is a form of agitation, collectivized and cultural, which says a lot about how skilfully it was written, because this type of writing acts on an emotional level, is embodied and sublimated, and gives shape to the thousand faces of reality.
Truman Capote he asserted that the river of nonfiction and the river of fiction will finally sleep in the same bed one day; this statement becomes true today, because the podcast as a narrative entity contains enough truth to make the comment, the relevant observation, the close look justified, never sweetened, never romanticized, but which becomes exegetical, ambitious.
The podcast Where Nobody Looks will follow in the autumn a documentary always signed by Pablo Trincia and created by Sky and SkyTg24.