An exhibition by Erika Pellicci
Intus et in cute is a research project that investigates surfaces as places of memory, preservation, and transformation. Through photographic works and an installation, Erika Pellicci draws connections between the skin of the body and the skin of the book, observing how time, history, and experience leave traces on both.
The title derives from a Latin expression used by the poet Persius and literally means “within and beneath the skin.” In its original context, the phrase refers to a profound understanding of human nature, capable of moving beyond appearances to reach what is hidden, intimate, and layered. In this exhibition, the expression becomes a lens through which to explore the relationship between what is offered to the gaze and what remains concealed beneath the surface.
The works emerge from an encounter with the collections of the Lucca State Library and the materials that inhabit it: books, pages, annotations, rare volumes, archives, and preservation systems. The artist’s gaze focuses on seemingly marginal details that reveal the deeply corporeal nature of the book. Paper, like human skin, records the passage of time; it retains folds, scars, alterations, imprints, and traces of presence. Each mark becomes testimony to a layered history.
Throughout the exhibition, anatomical fragments enter into dialogue with pages from scientific treatises, handwritten notes overlap with vascular structures, while the elements that shelter and protect books acquire an autonomous presence. Human skin, paper, velvet, display cases, and protective coverings become membranes that both separate and connect interior and exterior, visible and invisible.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the theme of care and preservation. Just as the body protects what it contains, the book safeguards knowledge, memories, and imaginaries. The Library itself is revealed as a complex organism composed of monumental halls, storage rooms, hidden passages, and concealed spaces that preserve a vast heritage only partially accessible to view. Preservation does not necessarily coincide with display: much of what is safeguarded remains unseen, entrusted to time and care.
This reflection also takes shape through a site-specific installation that introduces into the reading room a display case containing a bodily presence that can only be partially perceived. Hidden beneath a fabric, a body suggests its existence without ever fully revealing itself. Like a closed volume holding contents yet to be discovered, the work invites visitors to confront the limits of vision and the desire to know what remains concealed.
The exhibition thus constructs a network of correspondences between bodies, books, and architectures of preservation. Every surface becomes a threshold: skin protects the body, the page preserves writing, the binding safeguards the book, the display case protects the precious object, and the library collects and transmits knowledge. In each of these instances, what appears never fully exhausts what it contains.
Intus et in cute identifies a liminal space between visibility and invisibility, preservation and transformation, the human body and the body of the book. Through this project, Erika Pellicci offers an intimate perspective on the Library’s heritage while proposing a reflection on the book as a material object, an archive of memory, and a generator of worlds. A living organism, deeply connected to our physical and sensory experience, capable of preserving knowledge, stories, and traces of human life across time.
The exhibition will be open from September 25 to October 11, 2026 during the opening hours of the Lucca State Library.
Erika Pellicci (1992) lives and works between Tuscany and Berlin. She graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence and completed a Master’s degree in Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna in 2020. Her research focuses on the relationship between body and space, using performative experience as a form of witnessing reality. Through photography, her primary medium, she investigates time and the vulnerability of the present, exploring intimate and familial relational patterns often connected to play and processes of identity formation. Her work brings personal experience and collective memory into dialogue, with particular attention to materiality and the traces left by lived experience.