Karla Hiraldo Voleau uses photography and performance to explore themes of intimacy, identity, and healing, often drawing from her own life to create spaces of reflection and empowerment. In You Can Have It All (2019, 2024), she reflect on self-acceptance, body dysmorphia and the therapeutic potential of art as a means to process trauma and reclaim agency. A must-seen at the 2026 Fotofestival Lenzburg programme.
“The project began with a letter I wrote to my five-years-older self, which became a starting point to confront body dysmorphia during a solo trip to the Mediterranean sea in 2019.
Through self-portraits and performative gestures, dares and short challenges, I explored my relationship with my appea-rance, reclaiming my body as my own. Body dysmorphia is something I rarely read about, and yet every woman I know suffers from it, at different levels. It is thinking that your body looks different to what it actually is, making you feel very anxious, depressed, vulnerable, or just plain ugly and it is mainly triggered by unreasonable images of perfect women all around the internet and the advertising industry.
I decided that my solution to this distraught was to aggressively confront my-self to my body, all the time: use it, pho-tograph it, from all angles, make it banal, normal again. Eventually I would look at it as a tool, as a toy even, and I could accept it like it is through repetition and fun (the fun of doing). Five years later, I revisited this work, responding to my younger self and reflecting on the healing process after the end of a significant love relationship.
The practice of transformative rituals helped me confront emotions and fears. In these rituals, I connected with knowledge often dismissed as «witchcraft,» reclaiming it as a tool for feminist empowerment and personal growth (automatic writing, burning, screaming, interacting with plants, all in the mountains and nature).
This work builds on the legacy of feminist photographers like Francesca Woodman, Jo Spence, and Ana Mendieta, whose practices highlight the body as a site of resistance, transformation, and storytelling. By engaging in this lineage, I see art as a radical space where vulnerability becomes power, and where the personal is inherently political.”
Karla Hiraldo Voleau
“In 2019, Karla Hiraldo Voleau wrote a letter to her future self. She was in Greece, alone, doing a job that made her wake up early and work with her hands in the soil. She took self-portraits every day. It was a time in which she perceived her body in a distorted way, obsessing over certain details. Constructing images of herself was a way to overturn that feeling, a shock therapy to learn abour herself.
In 2024, in Italy, Hiraldo Voleau rereads that letter and replied. She writes that no, she does not spend enough time away from her phone, in the sun. No, she is not a mother. And yes, she still worries about how her body looks a body she does not take care of as much as she should, or as much as she thinks she should, but which allows her to climb 2,500 metres, to run even when she hates it.
You Can Have It All emerges from two moments five years apart. From two complex and intense passages; from break-ups, body dysmorphia, anger and insomnia. Photography transforms both.
Thinking of the work of feminist photographers such as Jo Spence and Ana Mendieta, Hiraldo Voleau designs rituals, gestures and challenges where the body resists and changes. Snatching oranges without hands. Writing a magic number over and over until it means nothing. Climbing a mountain, setting love letters on fire.
If a photograph is a flat, static surface on which the eyes of others can move, Hiraldo Voleau’s process is the exact opposite. It is the writing of a technique to reprogram the body, pushing it to feel and see what will lead it to healing. It is a way to allow it to be, before being looked at in its simplicity, perhaps one of the greatest liberations.”
Camilla Marrese
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