Your name
Cristina Rizzi Guelfi
Place of birth
Lugano, Switzerland
Place where you live now
Italy
3 words to describe you
Cinematic, uncanny, irreal
Why do you take pictures?
Because I'd like to be able to transpose what I "see" in my imagination into an image. It's a way to live the parallel lives that exist in my imagination. All the stories and images in my head can exist through photography.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Old movies. Cinema is definitely a big influence on my work. I have a great affection for Hitchcock, Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard and old B movies.
Who are your influences?
Still movies, but also 50s and 60s culture and I also allude to other eras such as the 70s, 80s and photographers like Larry Sultan and Slim Aarons. I do love to read as well. I like to read science fiction and horror books, like Richard Matheson, Lovecraft and H. G. Wells.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
Depends, from something I've read or seen. Sometimes even one word triggers something. Everything is born instinctively. I try to leave my work as open to interpretation as possible because trying to pin some sort of specific story or intent onto a piece is quite boring
What impact would you like your art to have?
I wish I could play a myriad of different characters, each woman living a different life, lost in her own reality and longing for a solution.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
The ones that not only allow me to project my vision onto the world, but also become part of that world.
Is there anything you want to add?
I would like to leave something mixed between cynical and humorous, I wish that when you look at my photographs you would smile but also think, because life is full of moments where humor blends tragedy and ugliness to perfection.

We need a face [?]
Project statement

Selfies have become a storytelling tool, simple and immediate, but full of meaning. In an increasingly frenetic and immersive communication space, it is no coincidence that selfies have an increasingly important relevance. It is a kind of return to origins, made up of a representative language that is easy to use. Through selfies, in fact, you have the opportunity to show yourself to the world exactly in the way you want to be seen, or to make you perceive the sensations of a given moment only from the expression of the face, selecting precisely the information to be communicated. The series "we need a face [?]" Was born to make fun of the widespread practice of the obsession with selfies, replacing faces with photographs that were purchased from a bank of images.
Non-verbal communication and in particular facial expressions is the subject of much research aimed at understanding and interpreting its function. Neuroscience also tells us that facial expressions are not subject to our will. This happens because the face and its expressions are controlled by the oldest part of our brain, the part inherited from the species of our ancestors, or the innermost part of the brain from which our archaic emotions and instincts derive.
Darwin demonstrated that facial representations of emotion in humans, as in other mammals, are innate, a product of evolution. The expressions that denote joy, fear or anger, for example, are the same in men of different ethnic groups, cultures or civilizations. (Darwin's nativist conception -1872)

cristina rizzi guelfi
@cristinarizziguelfi