Little Perversions (The Frantic Journey of the Wandering Womb) is a photographic project developed in 2023. The project investigates the realms of desire and disorder by means of re-collection and re-production of Hysterical Iconographies.
The images presented in this project are imaginary visions inspired by the visual and written evidence presented in two very different books: the medical photography landmark "The Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière" by Paul Regnard and Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and “Magic; Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography”, an illustrative Victorian book on magic by Albert A. Hopkins. These staged, at times theatrical, self-portraits aim to unfold the intrinsic guilt often attributed to female desire by recollecting a past that feels strangely near.Moreover, the project investigates the performative tendencies and impulses that have shaped and constructed femaleness in two very distinct roles: the magician’s assistant and the hysterical patient.
In the Salpêtrière clinic, female desire and feminine gestures, inappropriately confined to the realms of mental illness, are treated and regulated in a variety of manners: hydrotherapy, electric shock therapy, confinement and eventually presented to an audience. On the magic stage, the very same gestures are supervised by the magician and re-enacted by his assistant as part of an elaborate and exuberant trick.