Interview by Gaia Amorello
All Images © Giorgia Zaffanelli
Giorgia Zaffanelli (Milan, 1994) is a contemporary artist who works with photography, videography and performance. Since January 2023 she’s also been running SPBH Space, a laboratory, gallery and community center in Milan. This laboratory, gallery and community centre fosters experimentation, collaboration and cross-pollination between art, fashion and design on a local and international scale. Her artistic work, deeply rooted in feminist issues and activism, and frequently based on personal experience, combines various fictional strategies, with an outlook to creating narratives that serve to question a cultural, aesthetic and symbolic heritage that is assumed to be unchangeable.
Following her studies in anthropology, Giorgia refocused her lens on herself exploring how her body incorporates social relations and contradictions. She chose to translate her experiences, especially the traumatic ones, into a visual language to explore the complexities of personal and social life. Addressing the theme of invisibilisation was a profound need that guided the development of A Myth About the Menarchy (2022 – on going), submitted for our Open Call. Although lacking a preferred means of expression, Giorgia sees this limitation as a liberation, allowing her to adapt language to her needs.
Through different media such as video, writing, physical and digital manipulation of images; the symbolism of her research is layered and polymorphic.
Giorgia strongly argues that acknowledging the embodiment of experiences is crucial to decolonising spaces, linking personal struggles to broader political systems of oppression and discrimination. Her artistic exploration thus becomes a way of addressing and challenging the political and social issues that influence her everyday life, without neglecting the complexities of her multiple and intersecting identities.
Indeed, the aim of her research is to give form and visibility to contradiction, while at the same time seeking a visual synthesis between complexity and coherence.
During the time she faced cancer, Giorgia’s body became an instrument of thought and resistance. This experience influenced her reflection on feminist issues such as motherhood, the concept of performativity and ableism in different ways. By re-appropriating her body and her image, Giorgia challenges the representations that make the sick body shameful, affirming the dignity of her experience as a bald and infertile woman.
Gaia Amorello (GA): Hello Giorgia, welcome to this section dedicated to the shortlisted authors from the Open Call. Congratulations for being selected with your project and thank you for participating!
First of all, can you tell us something about yourself, your work and how you started approaching photography?
Giorgia Zaffanelli (GZ): I would say that my attraction and at the same time repulsion to photography started a while ago, when I would roam with a camera in hand, exploring the world through the lens.
As I started my studies in anthropology, I – luckily – found out that the photographic tool can be (or perhaps always is) violent and extremely problematic when it comes to photographing ‘others’.
Of course, it’s not about the tool itself, it’s about our gaze, which in my case is white and western, therefore carrying within itself problematic structures of power.
There have been two significant shifts within my work throughout time. The first involved redirecting the lens toward myself rather than outward. I ceased carrying the camera with me everywhere. It was a natural progression, I just didn’t care anymore.
This may sound like a downside process, but it is not. What I realised at that time was that my body, like everyone’s, carries inscribed social relations and contradictions, which I wanted to explore.
I simply chose to start from there, that is, from what I know best and what somehow belongs to me, in order to explore how ‘the personal’ is intertwined with the broader societal context, thus becoming political.
The second step came with the recognition that the photographic medium was insufficient to me. Throughout the experience recounted in The Myth About the Menarchy, due to physical limitation, I was prevented from using a camera. I have tried, during my first hospitalization, but the consequences of assembling the equipment myself an hour after undergoing surgery took a toll on my body for at least a couple of weeks.
I asked myself: why do you think you need your pictures to be canonically beautiful? The answer, back then, was that we are flooded with images depicting women with cancer trying to make them adhere to the standards of the healthy body. I decided to distance myself from that canon, which I deemed insincere and dangerous, and explore alternative paths. This also allowed me to experiment with new media, such as video, painting and collage.
(GA): About your artistic practice, in several works you deal with the theme of the body and its representation, specifically through self-portraits. Can you explain to us the reasons for this choice? Are there artists of your inspiration or references you consider important for your research?
(GZ): I strongly believe that the acknowledgment of the embodiment of experiences is the stronger tool we have to decolonize our spaces. Meaning that personal struggles, such as those experienced by women, are connected to larger political systems of oppression and discrimination. Always.
The binary of the personal and the political is limiting because it neglects the complexities both of personal life and of society. And the intricate ways in which the two aspects continually intersect.
I started from here because I had nowhere else where to start from.
Uncomfortably simple: translating my experiences, especially the traumatic ones, into visual language helps me talk about myself, and thus understand what I am going through. Even when my therapist falls short, he recommends I retreat to the studio, work through it, and then return to our sessions.
It is also my way of addressing and challenging political and societal themes that play a big role in my daily life, without overlooking the complexities of my personal experience and the multiple, intersecting identities that shape it.
My references in this process have been various, primarily drawn from literature.
Maggie Nelson, with The Argonauts, as well as Joan Didion and her Year of magical thinking, for their being, while writing, at once near and far, inside and outside. I think this is the only way to make what appears definitive not conclusive. Audre Lorde and Anne Sexton poems, for intertwining the erotic with the struggle for civil rights, teaching me that being a feminist does not necessarily coincide with denying one’s body as a woman. And that love and care are inherently political practices. Jo Spence, with Putting Myself in the Picture, for her ironic take on her breast cancer, and for embodied resistance to established norms.
I could go on…
(GA): In A Myth About the Menarchy (2022- on going) presented to the Open Call, you explore in an autobiographical way the theme of reclaiming one’s body and re-appropriating one’s own image. Your body becomes a space of resistance.
Can you tell us about the project and how you see this work as a manifesto of awareness and a counter-narrative?
(GZ): We are still unable to look upon a disease such as cancer if it does not look like of the pink-ribbon stories of self care and juice fasts and positive thinking or of images of grateful and grinning bald women who reveal no pain; or literature and public readings in which sickness exists for the epiphanies of the well, and is always described as a matter of appearance – a sick woman’s fragility, her paleness, her vulnerable beauty. We all know what I’m talking about, and of course it’s not just limited to women dealing with cancer.
In essence, I failed to recognise myself and my experience in that kind of imaginary. Dealing with cancer proved to be a far more complex experience, and I sought to bestow dignity upon this reality.
Also, ‘ugliness’ played a big role in this. Inhabiting a bold, infertile and weak body for a while has been a painful tool for understanding how I relate to my body, the expectations I placed upon it, how I relate to being a woman, and a potential mother. My body became an instrument of resistance to the extent that it took on forms that I did not desire, and that I had to confront. It may sound naive, but this grants you a certain degree of freedom.
During that time, my body became a tool for thought, and it still is.
Patriarchy imposes models of femininity. While, for a certain amount of time, my attempts to reject them aligned me with characteristics traditionally associated with men, thanks to the work carried out in this context I was able to reclaim my personal ‘femininity’ and to reconnect it strongly with the natural course of things.
Sometimes, political actions and ideals find synthesis through life itself. In this case, I had no choice, but the experience of cancer and the subsequent self-reflection enabled a vital synthesis between my feminist ideals and what it means for me to be a woman in the world.
(GA): The project is layered in several languages: video, photography, collage. Can you tell us about your creative process and how the various languages deepen different thematics of the project?
(GZ): My creative process never follows a linear structure. It is highly instinctive.
For example, when the doctors delivered the news that probably as a result of chemotherapy my fertility would be permanently affected, I constructed some nests. It was a process that could be called sculptural, but I do not identify as a sculptor. My aim was just not to deprive myself of the possibility of being a mother, and the nest was the first symbolic extension of that desire. I intertwined my hair – which I cut before undergoing chemotherapy – with twigs, and placed the nests in various spaces dear to me throughout the city. One of them, the one in the backyard of my best friend – who’s been my family during my illness -, has welcomed a broom of baby blackbirds.
It is a process that can also change over time.
When I got sick, it was the peak of the Covid pandemic, consequently Instagram became my preferred tool for sharing my experience. I would take photos with my phone, collect text and images online, and create small narratives that would end up in a post. That marked my initial foray into visual processing.
Nowadays, those same images contribute to huge collages. By printing them, cutting them out, experimenting with size, the meaning is still evolving. While my earlier intent was to react to an emergency situation, prompting my Instagram followers to confront discomforting imagery, I now find myself in my solo studio, exploring topics that go beyond my cancer experience, such as my desire for motherhood.
I lack a preferred expressive tool, which is limiting on the one hand and liberating on the other. I will never be able to take a ‘perfect’ photograph, or control the light flawlessly while shooting a video. I am more interested in adapting the language to my needs, to what I want to express.
I’d say that the only constant in my creative process is the involvement of other people. In the creation of A Myth About the Menarchy, the people who were close to me during the illness played a central role: emotional, intellectual, and practical. Without them this work would not exist.
(GA): From the large format portraits of your face scattered in the river to the cropped detail of the collages, the project includes spatial experimentation of the image. Do you imagine other possible extensions of this work?
(GZ): My current efforts on the project are all focused in an attempt of synthesis. It’s challenging to hold together the different mediums, and the diverse themes addressed within A Myth About the Menarchy. Many people I have been talking to suggest dividing the work into individual parts, but I still believe the project makes sense as a whole.
Personal experience is inherently complex, as is social reality. I aim to maintain the visibility of contradictions, as I believe they carry value.
So, right now I am looking for a visual synthesis between complexity and coherence. I participated in this call also to get a new push in this direction.
(GA): How do you perceive the connection between the image and various spaces, encompassing both physical and digital spaces? In your perspective, what significance do these spaces hold for you?
(GZ): I’m still not quite sure whether it was egocentrism or a need of questioning public space, but ‘occupying the land’ was a deep need that accompanied me through the development of A Myth About the Menarchy. Enlarging myself through the art tool, so that I cannot go unnoticed, has been my tactic of infiltrating spaces. I needed to be looked at, to have answers from those who saw me, and to question the structures of visibility in which we are immersed. As I mentioned earlier, this happened in both physical and digital realms.
I must admit that the digital space brought with it quite a few issues: many people were triggered by the images I was posting on Instagram, others sought one-on-one confrontation, often in an attempt to be reassured. It was interesting in that it revealed how unaccustomed we are to confronting the difficulties of others, especially when those difficulties are expressed in images that can be distressing. Thinking about cancer is vastly different when communicated through a staged image of a woman in makeup, typically in her underwear, proudly displaying her scars, compared to seeing an image of someone covered in blood due to a poorly inserted IV.
Without seeking to compare experiences, of course, we understand that – and I understand it better myself – in these days when we are inundated with images from Gaza. I participate in discussions where there is a question of whether or not it is helpful to the Palestinian cause to show in such an explicit way what terrible things are happening to people’s bodies there. Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is why do we think it is undignified to show the body of a person who has suffered inhumane violence? I do not have an answer, but I am afraid this reluctance has something to do with our aversion to confronting that violence, our unwillingness to acknowledge its existence, and the unsettling realization that it could happen to us as well.
(GA): Pellicola Magazine and Mucho Mas! selected your work to spark an encounter and a discussion on transformation, not only of the image but also related to its extension into space. What are your expectations related to this encounter?
(GZ): I participated in the call launched by Pellicola Magazine and Mucho Mas! as I’m eager to witness the manifestation of the work on the page and, if chosen for the exhibition, within a physical display space.
What I love about A Myth About the Menarchy is its ability to morph into various forms depending on the space it inhabits. This gives it great freedom, but, as mentioned earlier, it also presents the challenge of maintaining cohesion. I have confidence in your work, therefore I am happy to collaborate with you in that imaginative effort of synthesis and coherence.
