About This Project

Valeria Laureano

Amalìa

My photographic research is inspired by a true story featuring a female serial killer from the early 1900s: Leonarda Cianciulli, the soap-maker of Correggio.
Soon the story, having left those events behind, landed in another territory, drawing from my personal imagination.
A story between the macabre and the seductive emerges that highlights a profound point of reflection: the tangles of the human mind, its dark, primitive and savage side; a hidden and unknown place that reveals itself in its roughness and contradictions.
In a disturbing atmosphere lives a world inhabited by women who are sensual and rugged, vulnerable and powerful, victims and executioners.
With their restless temperament they carry with them life, birth, love and beauty but also death, loneliness, remorse and madness.
A complex and mysterious female universe, which in its indecipherability, attracts and repels.
This constant dualism harks back to the figure of witches who in their mythological dimension were bewitching and destructive women, half-women and half-animals, endowed with occult powers as they were in contact with the evil one or with supernatural entities.

Instagram