Wu Ming - Members and Public Personae

Members and Public Personae

The members of Wu Ming are typically known as "Wu Ming 1", "Wu Ming 2", "Wu Ming 3", "Wu Ming 4", and "Wu Ming 5". Real names are not secret though:

• Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1)
• Giovanni Cattabriga (Wu Ming 2)
• Luca Di Meo (Wu Ming 3 – He left the group in the spring of 2008)
• Federico Guglielmi (Wu Ming 4)
• Riccardo Pedrini (Wu Ming 5)

The five authors do extensive book tours (which they describe as "almost gratefuldeadesque") and frequently appear in public. However, they refuse to be photographed or filmed by the media. Even on their official website, they do not provide any pictures of themselves. Here is how Wu Ming 1 explained the group's stance in a 2007 interview:

Once the writer becomes a face... it's a cannibalistic jumble: that face appears everywhere, almost always out of context. A photo is witness to my absence; it's a banner of distance and solitude. A photo paralyses me, it freezes my life into an instant, it negates my ability to transform into something else. I become a "character", a stopgap to hurriedly fill a page layout, an instrument that amplifies banality. On the other hand my voice – with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations – is witness to a presence even when I'm not there; it brings me close to people and doesn't negate my transformative capacity because its presence is dynamic, alive and trembling even when seemingly still.

In Wu Ming's official biographical page (Italian version), the collective denies rumors they once beat up a press photographer:

The dates and places vary, but the core of all versions stays the same. Well, it never ever happened, but it's true that, like Auda abu Tayi in Lawrence of Arabia or King Kong in the famous gala opening scene, we're no camera-mongers. We don't go on TV either. We are shy.