Karla Hiraldo Voleau You Can Have it All 2019, 2024

Text by Camilla Marrese:

In 2019, Karla Hiraldo Voleau writes 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 is a way to overturn that feeling, a shock therapy to learn how to stay.

In 2024, in Italy, Hiraldo Voleau rereads that letter and replies. 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.