Text by Giulia Del Gobbo
All Images © Karla Hiraldo Voleau
Karla Hiraldo Voleau holds a master’s in photography from ECAL Lausanne (2018). Her first photobook, Hola Mi Amol, was published by Self Publish Be Happy in 2019. She has received numerous awards including the VFG Prize for Young Swiss Photography (2018), the Olympus Fellowship (2020), the PICTO Talent grant (2024), and the Fotofestival Lenzburg Jury’s Prize (2025), and has been a Swiss Design Awards finalist (2022, 2026). Her solo exhibition Another Love Story debuted at the MEP Paris (2022) and toured internationally, becoming her second monograph with Mörel Books (2023). She has exhibited at Art Basel, ICP New York, Paris Photo, and Deichtorhallen Hamburg, held residencies in Paris and Venice, and has been represented by Zurich’s Christophe Guye gallery since 2024.
You Can Have it All (In return for everything) is on view (until June 7, 2026) at Fotofestival Lenzburg – where Karla received the jury’s prize –, as well as part of the EXPOSED festival in Torino. Next, her work will be on view at Art Basel, Switzerland (June 15–21, 2026), at La Vetrina in Venice, Italy (June 20–July 18, 2026) and at the Institute for Photography in Warsaw (July 1–August 30, 2026).
Nabihah Iqbal’s This World Couldn’t See Us plays in the background, while notes from a recent call with Karla Hiraldo Voleau find their place on a blank page. The song’s refrain, You Can Have it All (In return for everything), lends its title to Karla’s new series of pictures, a visual invitation (not to forget) to practice acts of self-creation and self-care.
It all begins in 2019, when she starts misperceiving her own reflection. Meanwhile, she writes a letter to her five-years-later self.
‘Dear me in five years
Are you still concerned with your body image?
Do you still create images of your body?
Dear me in five years,
Do you have fun?
Do you have fun with yourself?’
Karla is in Greece, solo-travelling, looking for some reparative time. She decides that the only way to embrace her distorted visions, is to fiercely confront herself to her body – all the time – by claiming it, shooting it, reshaping it, using it as another element, like it is something she has. With self-portraits, performative gestures, written thoughts, Karla stages actions where she can feel her body’s weight and volume.
In her film-based research You Can Have it All (In return for everything), we follow her steps out in the sun-bleached Greek landscapes. She runs, poses, jumps, builds, climbs, screams…the fun of doing, as she names it. She is tangled with the shutter release of her camera, an umbilical cord, a life-pump she cannot survive without. Enacting scenes in peripheral rural spaces, Karla uses her body as both subject and measure, probing tension, vulnerability, doubling, and self-confrontation while embodying subtle forms of constraining social structures.
Across these images, acts of self-recording become inquiries into perception, mediation, production and a way to gather knowledge about the borders of her own body. While taking a step, she thinks about what her action is going to bring to the world, and what the world’s reaction is going to trigger in her: it’s like Karla’s photography is quite adept at configuring relations between body, self, and society through its unscripted choreographic decisions.
‘Dear past me,
You catch me at a bad time: I got my heart broken last month, and it’s the biggest pain I’ve ever been in. It feels like the last straw. I’ll try not to be too mopey.
Dear past me,
I do remember this time in Greece, more than you think. It shaped me into the woman I am today. The images you took back then still bring me joy and make me feel empathy.’
It’s 2024 and Karla is in Verzasca, Switzerland. She replies to her 2019 letter, reflecting on how rehearsing transformative rituals helped her confront emotions and fears, showing a body – exhausted yet ironic – that wrestles and cherishes all at once.
There is a unique way in which photography, performance and something close to poetry converge in Karla’s images. Carving personal stories into rocks, she carries out meditative handwriting with dense ink and thick brushstrokes, putting into words declarations of love, of sorrow, of vulnerability. The human compulsion to leave traces, the genuine necessity to tell something honest, to trust each other on this subjective story.
In doing so, she recalls the work of artist Fina Miralles, of those photographs where she would inscribe her footprint on the city, tie herself to a tree, let her feet sink into the sand, or cover her whole body in straw. A practice of denouncing the control that governs capitalist society, from the public to the most intimate sphere, and the power relations that shape and condition our bodies.
What Karla and Fina share is a way of merging their bodies with a landscape, a search for the self in relation to its surroundings. Karla seeks, indeed, shelter in nature. In her images, branches become shoulders, armpit hair bared to the sun looks more and more like a wild mountain peak bathed in light, her green boots blur into moss among the trees’ roots and her hair blend into the winding of the river. The beginning of those choreographies is perhaps also the beginning of an understanding of what might be called interiority.
In the last photo of her most recent catalogue You Can Have it All (In return for everything) – published in May 2026 by Artphilein Books –, Karla runs in a Swiss forest, her back to the reader. Eventually, she finds her body again. Eventually, through the process of becoming something else, photography helps her become herself.
‘Dear me in five years
Has the world changed at all?
Who is at war?
Are you?’
