I look at photography as somatic practitioner with a background in dance/improvisation/performance. The last five years, I started integrating video and photography in my practice  as creative tools of investigation, exploration and expression. As a result new questions started formulating in regards to identity, body image, aesthetics, power dynamics and other issues related to modern visual culture and our response/contribution to it.

 

Performance and Photography become the two main fields of my interest in order to explore how they have influenced each other, experiment with what kind of new possibilities can be created from their intersection and fusion, and how different aspects of photography as performance and vice-verse that tend to be neglected can be revealed and transformed.

 

The initial intention of the current project was to  scrutinise from within the photographic process, unveiling its hidden and invisible performative aspects, able to communicate beyond the photograph itself. The aim was to create a synthetic practice of hybridisation where the boundary between performer and photographer is less distinct than one might initially assume, a place where the photographic process is a social Event in itself while the female body by undertaking the role and function of the camera becomes a “performative machine” addressing questions about phallocentrism, power dynamics, gaze, conventions and taboos.

 

A starting point was to examine the culture surrounding  contemporary photographic practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While there is a broad theoretical understanding on the medium of photography, cultural debates around the status of the photographic image in the 21st century, analysis of the different ways to look at photography and photographs, there is very little concerning the powerful role of the camera, the performative aspect of the photographic process and the power dynamics in the relationship between photographer and subject.

 

 

Within this framework, an experimental journey began giving life to "VULVOgraphy". A creative practice based response -from a gynocentric point of view-to the often (in)visible phallocentric world of photography.