Interview - Alessandra Chiericato
Curation: L’Image Cannibale

1 - Upon entering your show The Cannibal Image, you feel lit up and completely untethered from the world you just left outside. How did you achieve this thrilling and rigorous show and what response do you want people to have when they enter the space and again when they leave the space?

The Cannibal Image is based on a question that has fascinated me for a long time. What is the relationship between photography and reality? Instead of seeing photography as something that represents the world, I have become interested in how photography can absorb it, transform it, and give it a new presence. This is why I use the idea of cannibalism as a metaphor. To me, photography is an active presence, one that feeds on reality rather than simply recording it. In The Cannibal Image, photographs are living bodies that occupy space, confront the viewer, and almost seem to return our gaze. The exhibition is built around this tension, encouraging visitors to consider what they are looking at more than passive objects. Another question was, is photography a trace of reality, or is it already another reality? I believe it is both. The moment the camera captures the world it transforms the way we perceive it.

This idea is conveyed through the artworks in the space of Chapelle de la Charité in Arles, an ancient church, today hosting exhibitions. I imagined the exhibition itinerary as a climax from darkness to revelation, where the image slowly takes a physical presence in space. You can feel it while entering step by step into the space facing the work by Aapo Huhta. In Figure #82, an anthropomorphic figure appears to emerge from a dense, impenetrable fog. Tangible and evanescent, it reveals itself as a spectral presence, a fragment of energy in transit. No longer a descriptive tool, the image becomes an unstable material and a space of transformation. This is the beginning of something that one can perceive in the entire exhibition. Like an endless parade of passersby or flashes of light from another world, these images, these bodies, present themselves to the viewer who’s invited to cross the threshold where the imagse become flash.

Although The Cannibal Image takes place in such a space, this is not intended to be a religious experience. Thus, the architecture simply creates an atmosphere that intensifies even more this idea of embodiment. So, as visitors enter the exhibition, I hope they immediately feel they have stepped into a different space, one where images exist and have their own agency. By the time they leave, I hope they carry more questions than answers. Rather than offering a definitive statement, I want the exhibition to open up a reflection on how photography shapes the way we experience and understand reality.

2 -You were awarded the 2024 Curatorial Research Fellowship of Les Rencontres d'Arles for this project The Cannibal Image. What specific image, text, or research finding first set the concept for this show in motion?

The starting point for this research is not a photograph, but an image that comes from literature and that has deeply shaped my reflections since I was a teenager. I am referring to Conte Ugolino della Gherardesca, whom Dante Alighieri encounters in Canto XXXIII of “Inferno”, in the act of gnawing on the skull of Archbishop Ruggeri degli Ubaldini. Count Ugolino was a 13th-century Pisan nobleman who was imprisoned and then condemned to starve to death along with his sons. In the poem, Dante seems to suggest that Ugolino, consumed by hunger, ended up eating his own children and that is why in this Canto he is portrayed with his teeth in the skull of his enemy, the man he holds responsible for his fate. This episode takes place in Anténore, the circle of Hell reserved for traitors to their country or their political party. Here, the human being is reduced to his most bestial nature, to the point of committing the ultimate act of cannibalism. But this scene is not merely one of horror. For Dante, it also serves as a political commentary. Through Ugolino’s fate, the poet denounces the conflicts and betrayals tearing apart the Florence of his time. Ugolin’s soul thus continues to re-enact his story eternally. It endlessly devours the one it blames for its downfall. His act transforms the past into a living image, where memory, violence, and history remain inseparable. It is precisely this idea that interested me, that of an image that does not merely represent reality, but embodies it, reactivates it, and consumes it forever.

This image was as the starting point for the exhibition precisely because it already contains a reflection on the nature of the image. Ugolino is a shadow, an image of a body, and at the same time a presence that still embodies a story and a trauma. Through his gaze, Dante portrays a tension between reality and representation, between the physical body and its image, which it is very much present in our interaction with images today. As art historian Hans Belting noted, images seem to take the place of the body, yet at the same time maintain a distance. It is precisely this ambiguity that interests me. The image survives reality and incorporates it to itself, but never completely coincides with it.

3 - Arles is famous for its eclectic array of exhibition venues. How did you land on the Chapelle de la Charité for this show, and what were the delights and challenges of curating within a site with such history and architecture?

This exhibition had actually been conceived for an imaginary space. The festival has a number of permanent venues it uses every year, but others spaces depend on a series of circumstances beyond the organization’s control. Luckily, this location happened to be available, and perfect for hosting this project. I found out about it fairly late, though, in January of this year. I confess that, at first, I was scared. It’s not an easy white cube, but a historic Baroque building, extremely imposing and commanding: the carpet, the side chapels, the altar… I was afraid the artworks would be overwhelmed by all of this. We also faced several restrictions imposed by the city council and the fine arts commission. The altar had to remain visible, as well as several other parts of the church. The artworks were meant to engage with the architecture and not hide it. So, I worked with the scenographer Amanda Antunes and the production manager Emma Hennegrave on an exhibition design that would highlight the artworks without sacrificing the context. The result is a display that follows the layout of the church and invites a two-way reading: from the entrance to the altar and from the altar to the exit.

4 - Your curation across the range of works and mediums is so compelling that it’s easy to overlook the beauty of the space itself—until we are led directly to the Baroque altarpiece behind Lucile Boiron’s work. What led you to place Boiron’s work at the altar and how did you create a dialogue among eight such distinct, powerful artists and spatialize the rest of the show?

Lucile Boiron's work occupies the altar because, for me, it represents the culmination of the exhibition. I have been following her practice for several years, but it was especially after seeing the installation she created at Musée Guimet for the 2022 Lyon Biennale that I hoped to exhibit her work one day. When I first saw the Chapelle de la Charité space, I immediately felt that the altar was the most meaningful place for her work. In Mater Porosa, the installation conceived for this space, the image seems to overflow its own limits. It expands, breathes, dissolves, and almost liquefies. The image becomes something deeply physical and tactile. Placing it on the altar transforms the end of the exhibition into a moment where the image is no longer simply represented but fully embodied in space. The Baroque altarpiece behind it reinforced that idea of incarnation without turning the exhibition into a religious statement. This was crucial to me also because her work is the culmination of a second theme that runs throughout the exhibition: the representation of the body, and more specifically, the female body. A body that overflows, that distorts, that appears and then disappears. A body that is flesh and guts. Thus, the show progressively speaks about body, intimacy, and identity. The body is central because the cannibal image is itself a body, one that absorbs other bodies, or rather their representations, transforming and reincarnating them into new forms. Intimacy naturally follows, since every representation of the body involves closeness, vulnerability, desire, and memory. Identity then emerges not as something fixed, but as something continuously constructed through this encounter with the gaze. Photography, installation, video, and sculpture all contribute to making the body of cannibal image becoming a physical presence in its own right.

Embodiment guided the entire exhibition. At the beginning of the exhibition, works by Aapo Huhta and Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen introduce images that seem to emerge from another world. Their photographs appear almost ghostly, inviting viewers to question where these presences come from while establishing an oscillation between appearance and disappearance. As visitors move further into the exhibition, the relationship between image and viewer becomes more direct. In the works of Melissa Boucher Morales and Orshi Drozdik, the image not only asks to be looked at, but also makes us aware of our own act of looking. The viewer is invited to reflect on desire, intimacy, and even voyeurism. This reflection then shifts toward the image itself as a fragmented body. Eli Craven and Camille Benarab Lopez challenge the traditional limits of the photographic frame, allowing the image to extend beyond its borders. The frame no longer acts as a window onto reality but becomes part of the image's own body, revealing hidden layers, memories, and unconscious associations. Finally, this fragmentation reaches its most tangible expression in the works of Dune Varela and Lucile Boiron. Dune presents printed images of sculptural fragments that blur the distinction between photograph and object, while Lucile pushes this transformation even further. Her work becomes porous, tactile, and almost organic, immersing viewers in the materiality of the image itself.

This progression, from apparition, to encounter, to fragmentation, and finally to embodiment, is the underlying structure of the exhibition.

5 - What can we look forward to seeing from you next?

For now, I’m focusing on writing another curatorial project that explores the forest, female solitude, and outlaws. I’m also working on several projects for the bicentennial of photography. Not actual exhibitions, but meetings, dialogues, and exchanges. So, stay tuned ☺