With just a little luck, you might never fall in love again

The project examines the role of romantic love in shaping women's identities.

“The body which will be loved is in advance selected and manipulated by the lens, subjected to a kind of zoom effect which magnifies it, brings it closer, and leads the subject to press his nose to the glass: is it not the scintillating object which a skillful hand causes to shimmer before me and will hypnotize me, capture me? This “affective contagion,” this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original. (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.)”

– Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

The romantic experience is imagined to be formative and transformative of women. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the condition of the woman as the inessential being, the other, the object, causes her – instead of trying to become the one, the subject – to search in the bond with the man, the chance to blend in with the sovereign subject. Roland Barthes points out the character of induction that we go through when we fall in love. In this sense, women, historically and culturally deprived of the position of the desiring subject, hold an even more passive place.

Going through my archive of photos taken by ex-boyfriends, I discovered myself as the object of the other's gaze. I selected the portraits in which I directly view the photographer/lover and cropped each image around my face to the proportions of identity documents. With this action, I stop being the passive object and become the subject, the active creator of this new images.

The photos represent a 27-year period in my adult life, when romantic love played a central role and the gaze of the loved one somehow defined my identity. Beyond revisiting a past, the work seeks to point out the repetitive character of the love encounter and its role in the construction of relationships, with its cyclical aspects of highs and lows, joys and sorrows, beginnings and endings.

Since 2020 I have been researching heterosexual romantic love from the female perspective. Having spent most of my adult life in relationships, I now embrace the physical and mental space to explore other passions and create my images of intimacy. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s notion of the uninterrupted space as condition for women to dedicate themselves to writing – or art –, my space appears, not only as a condition, but also as stage and the very object of creation.