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Lobismuller

Laia Abril

"Was the Werewolf of Allariz a woman?" Known as Manuel Blanco Romasanta, named at born Manuela as it was initially thought that her was a female; according to new forensic theories the most legendary serial killer of the history Spain, who claimed to be a werewolf, could have been intersexual.

Was the Werewolf of Allariz a woman? In 1853, Manuel Blanco Romasanta was tried for the murder of 17 people: he confessed to nine of them but declared himself not guilty because he was suffering from a curse that turned him into a wolf. Although this defence was rejected at trial, his death sentence was commuted to allow doctors to investigate the case. Thus, Romasanta has become part of Spanish folklore as the Werewolf of Allariz or less commonly as the Tallow Man, so named for the rendering of his victims fat to make high quality soap. 

More than 150 years later, this case still haunts our collective memory and baffles criminologists, psychologists and historians. According to recent forensic theories, the killer, who was named Manuela at the time of his birth and raised as a girl until the age of 6, could have lived with a rare syndrome of intersexuality. My methodology of work is based on research: accumulating huge amounts of data, stories, facts, analyses, then the conceptualization, connection and visualization of these. When making the book – together with Art Director Ramon Pez – the process was similar: in addition to researching the story, we added layer of visual and production research. For months and months we searched, collected, generated, organized, linked and got inspired by hundreds of visual inputs from the most remote sources - often they had nothing to do with photography or the story itself. 

We wanted to find the mood that would help us build the ideal object, one that would transmit the desired feeling, by keeping only a few keywords in our brains: Galicia, 19th century, killer, wolves, werewolf, landscapes, intersexuality, sex, femininity, masculinity, alchemy, magic, witchcraft, and superstition. The project moves slightly away from documentary photography, towards reconstruction, documentary fiction or art. It seems that our continuous and insatiable brain storming has led to the invention of a constructed world, a conceptual landscape, a narrative based on the semiotics of the feminine and masculine in the inhospitable sceneries of the Galician lands.

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Laia Abril

Laia Abril

Spain

Laia Abril is a photographer, visual artist and bookmaker from Barcelona. After graduating in Journalism in Barcelona and studying photography in the Internacional Center of Photography in New York; she enrolled FABRICA’s artist residency where she worked at COLORS Magazine as a creative editor and staff photographer for 5 years. Her projects have been shown internationally including the United States, Canada, UK, China, Poland, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, France, Italy or Spain. Her work is held in private and public collections as Musée de l’Elysée, Winterthur Museum in Switzerland or MNAC in Barcelona. In 2015 she was nominated for Foam’s Paul Huf Award and the Joop Swart Masterclass in 2014, and she is currently nominated to Catchlight and Visionary award as awarded with the Madame Figaro - Rencontres Arles award for her exhibition A History of Misogyny, chapter one: On Abortion. She self-published Thinspiration in 2012, Tediousphilia (Musée de l’Elysée, 2014) and The Epilogue (Dewi Lewis, 2014), which was highly acclaimed and shortlisted for the ParisPhoto-Aperture First Book Award, Kassel PhotoBook Festival and Photo España Best Book Award. Her new book-project Lobismuller (RM, 2016) — holder of the Images Book Award, on the story of the most enigmatic and bloodthirsty serial killer of the Spanish history, presented in Paris Photo 2016. After working for 5 years on her long-term project On Eating Disorders, Abril has started her new project A History of Misogyny, which first chapter On Abortion will be published by Dewi Lewis on 2017.
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    • Inside Outside Under Bucharest
      Massimo Branca
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      Jorge Panchoaga
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      Alejandro Chaskielberg
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      Pongo Léonard
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      Sarah Pabst
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      Salvatore Vitale
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      Giovanni Troilo
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    Salvatore Vitale
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