Your names
Eleana Konstantellos André
Valeria Arendar
Place of birth
Eleana: Paris, France
Valeria: Mexico City
Place where you live now
Eleana: Mexico City, Mexico
Valeria: Mexico City
3 words to describe you
Eleana: Creative, curious, intuitive
Valeria: Perceptive, restless and mm poetic
Why do you take pictures?
Eleana: I photograph because I am interested in seeing the world from new perspectives and discovering what at first glance may go unnoticed. Photography, for me, is not only a way to record, but a tool to question how the stories we consume are constructed. I am interested in using the image as a space for research, staging, and reconstruction of stories that have been told in a partial, manipulated, or invisibilized.
Through photography I can explore the fine line between what is real and what is possible, between what happened and what could have happened. I am attracted to this ambiguous terrain that allows, from the visual, to open questions about history, the media, the archive, and memory. In that sense, photographing is also a way of resisting the single version of events and constructing other possible narratives.
Valeria: I take pictures to think improbable images—images that don’t just show the world as it is, but as it could be. My work is rooted in the belief that photography isn't only about capturing what’s already visible, but about disrupting the programmed repetition of the image. I use fiction and material imagination as methods to resist the logic of representation, to open space for uncertainty, for what insists on appearing even when it has no place. I take pictures to hold the tension between what is seen and what escapes.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Eleana: I find inspiration in many places: in conversations with friends, museum visits, books, or even Instagram reels. Sometimes an idea appears in the most ordinary spaces (like when you overhear a conversation between two people on the street).
Valeria: I’m inspired by images that fail—those that don’t aim to represent faithfully, but rather open a space. I’m also drawn to silences, interruptions, distorted gestures. Often, instead of chasing a clear idea, I begin with discomfort—with an image I don’t know how to name. From there, I try to make the improbable visible.
Who are your influences?
Eleana: Some of my influences are Sophie Calle, Max Pinckers, Felipe Romero Beltrán and Iván Argote. I am interested in their ways of mixing the documentary with the poetic, and how they use the image to question social structures.
Valeria: Rather than specific artists, I’m influenced by philosophers who have critically reflected on images: Vilém Flusser, Jacques Rancière, Andrea Soto Calderón, Georges Didi-Huberman, Walter Benjamin. Their ideas help me think about how an image can not only represent, but also interrupt, affect, and open up possible worlds.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
Eleana: What determines the subject matter of my projects is usually an interest that develops over time. Many times it is a search process: to reveal, reinterpret, or find something that is not directly in the image, the archive, or history.
What impact would you like your art to have?
Eleana: I don't think of my work in terms of direct impact. I am more interested in opening spaces of doubt or reflection. If someone can relate to the images I create from their own experience generating questions, discomfort or curiosity in them, that's enough for me.
Valeria: I choose subjects that allow me to think of the image as a form of interruption, a gesture that makes visible what usually remains on the margins: intimate memories, forgotten gestures.
Valeria: I don’t really think of my work in terms of “impact,” as if it could generate a predictable effect or directly transform something. I’m more interested in creating images that can be inhabited—images someone might want to sit with, think from, or think through. If they manage to open a small space for doubt or possibility, that’s already enough.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Eleana: At the moment I am very interested in the work of Do Ho Suh, a South Korean artist who works with sculptures and installations. He creates replicas of architectural structures (such as his house) on canvas and then exhibits them as installations.
Valeria: The kind that shakes the subject’s certainties—that doesn’t fully give itself away, that keeps vibrating on the edge between what it shows and what it withholds. It doesn’t matter if it’s an image, a text, or a film— if it unsettles me even slightly, I keep coming back to it.
Is there anything you want to add?
Eleana: Thank you so much for the space and for sharing this project we've created with Melka Collective <3
Valeria: Just thank you for the space to share our thoughts and for opening this small window where images, language, and uncertainty can resonate together.

The dice was loaded from the start
Project statement

During the height of the Cold War, Mexico City became the perfect battle field for the United States and the Soviet Union for them to spy on each other. American and Soviet spies were known to be everywhere. It is even said that all Mexican presidents who were in charge of the country between 1958 and 1988 were recruited by the US Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the operation LITEMPO.

Mexico City operated as a strategic point for both sides as it was the only territory in Latin America where there was a representation of each country. Among the staff of each embassy, there were "secret" agents from their respective intelligence offices who enjoyed freedom of movement throughout the country.

This project questions the free operation of espionage networks on all fronts. In this way we seek to decipher the way in which Mexico City became one of the main nodes of global espionage for the defense of capitalism and the entry of communism into Latin America. We seek to understand the geopolitical importance of Mexico as the great scenario of the Cold War by presenting a history of intrigues, treasons, executions and tortures.

eleana konstantellos
valeria arendar
@eleanakonstantellos
@valearendar
@melka.photo