Eleonora Ghioldi: One is always allied with others
Eleonora Ghioldi is an Argentinian documentary photographer and filmmaker exploring issues of social justice in private and public spheres, from a gender perspective. Her work weaves together various media and methodologies, and her research is drawn from documentary field work as well as more formal inquiries.
Eleonora's work is primarily located in Argentina, where she was born, and the United States, where she emigrated to study photography. Since returning to Buenos Aires in 2018, she's become deeply involved with communities of activists, sociologists, and scientists.
Her four primary projects are Guerreras, Aborto Legal Ya, Atravesadxs and Desaparecides en Democracia, in which she explores the individual and systemic threats to women’s autonomy and are critical works in an ongoing narrative between United States and Latin America, exploring the commonalities and contrasts in women’s experiences in relationship to violence.
She is the author of the book Guerreras and co-author and co-compilator of the book Feminismos Insurgentes. Guerreras and Atravesadxs have been declared of interest for their commitment to making visible situations of inequality in daily life between men and women by various organizations, including the Senate of the Argentine Nation.
Her work has been exhibited in the USA, Argentina, Mexico and Spain. Beginning in July 2024, she will teach courses on Photography and Gender, with a focus on Latin American photography, at the University of Texas, El Paso.
IL: Eleonora, how did your interest in photography begin?
EG: It began when I was very young, around 17 or 18 years old. I had just finished high school and had started studying sociology and graphic design. After a few years, I decided on photography and traveled to the United States to study. I enrolled at City College, and that's where it all started.
IL: Guerreras is a very powerful work in which you include more than 250 portraits along with their testimonies of people or family members who are victims of gender-based violence in the United States, Mexico, and Argentina. What motivated you to create this work?
Ana, from Guerreras, 2018
Mariana, from the series Guerreras, 2018
EG: It began as a very personal experience. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and was tired of hearing testimonies from friends, those confidential stories shared behind closed doors where they would say, "this guy raped me," and so on. As a photographer, I express all my experiences through photography, which is a way of life. I proposed to three friends to do some portraits in their homes and write a testimony. I went to their homes, photographed them, printed the portraits in a large size, returned to their homes, and asked them to write their testimonies by hand. That's when I realized that this action had a very strong impact and that it could become a project where I could investigate more deeply. I was interested in having the image and the written word as testimonies in dialogue. So, I decided to continue simply because it was something I was interested in exploring. I started asking more friends if they wanted to participate and if they had experienced any type of sexual violence or knew someone who had. This process gradually took up a significant part of my life, and people started reacting positively to the project, wanting to participate.
IL: Was this before the #MeToo movement?
EG: This was before the #MeToo movement, yes. At that time, the issue of sexual violence wasn't discussed as openly; it was mostly talked about in private conversations among friends. Now, it's a conversation that is more prevalent. Back then, women felt ashamed to talk about it, and we blamed ourselves if we had experienced such violence. It was a completely different experience of sexual violence compared to how it's perceived and discussed now.
IL: You also went to the border to gather testimonies from mothers of missing women in Ciudad Juárez. Could you tell us more about that?
EG: Yes, the project was growing. After interviewing many women in Los Angeles, I went to Ciudad Juárez. I was very interested in the issues happening in border territories, how rape is used as a tool to conquer territory through the bodies of women. I wanted to investigate that, which is why I decided to go to Ciudad Juárez. There, I interviewed the mothers of Juárez, and that's how I became involved in the topic of femicides. After my experience interviewing the mothers in Juárez, I also wanted to interview families in Argentina because I am from Argentina. I didn't want to stigmatize Juárez; I wanted to show that these types of violence occur in many other places. I ended up in Argentina interviewing mothers and fathers who were victims of femicide.
I began to wonder about the role of rape and how it is used in armed conflicts. An example is what happened during the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina, where the state used disappearances and rapes to discipline illegally detained women. Since the vast majority of these women could no longer be interviewed because they had been disappeared or killed, I decided to interview the daughters of these mothers, thereby documenting that specific form of sexual violence that occurs in armed conflicts. My work is enriched by these first-person testimonies. I am interested in having the women themselves tell their stories. Moving away from the place where we were pigeonholed, where our stories were always told by others, was a fundamental point for me.
Norma Laguna Cabral, from Guerreras, 2018
The backbone of all my projects is violence, and the common thread has been trying to understand the reasons that facilitate the existence of this violence. These are not isolated cases; there is a complex issue that needs to be understood in order to know how to address it, how to attack it, what needs to be changed. So, in these works, I first try to ask questions: what is happening? And then to find out what the reasons are. I'm not sure if we can find so many answers; the answers are very complex, right? Because there is a multiplicity of violences and factors that make it possible for societies to have so many missing women, so many femicides, killings of transgender people, and so much gender violence.
What the work really tries to do is to move away from the sensationalist view that many media outlets always show when a femicide or disappearance occurs. It tries to move away from that and look at this issue more globally, as an umbrella term, to understand the connections, the networks, what is happening, and why it happens. On the other hand, I always incorporate interviews with academics and activists who work on these specific issues. This is with the intention of providing a theoretical framework, such as communication experts, lawyers, philosophers, economists, and many people from different professions who work and research gender violence.
Heather, from the series Guerreras, 2017
There is a very erroneous concept, a social imaginary, that when someone experiences violence, especially sexual violence, the violence ends there. In reality, that act of violence is just one point in a large arc of violence; the violence continues. For example, when women go to report a rape, they experience many other forms of violence, such as from the judicial system, from the justice system, they are continuously stigmatized.
IL: How do you take care of yourself internally while working with testimonies of these kinds of violence?
EG: The title of one of the interviews done for one of my first exhibitions was: "No one comes out unscathed." That title the interviewer gave to the article was so accurate... What happens is that when you see this work, you are exposed to this reality, and when you hear all these stories, it is impossible not to be changed by them. So, no one comes out unscathed. What happens to me is that these stories resonate with you for a long time. What I have learned is to try to respect my own pace, which is why the work took so long to complete. I allowed myself, or tried to allow myself, to listen to myself when I could no longer listen. I didn't want to become like a machine; I wasn't interested in doing that kind of work. I never went to a place where women who suffered gender violence were gathered to interview them all at once. That would have been much faster and more expedient. My work is always word-of-mouth; one of the people I interview leads me to another, and so on. In the book, there is a map showing how I reached all the people, and that has a reason. One of the points I wanted to demonstrate is that we all know someone who has suffered violence.
Deanna, from Guerreras, 2013
And what was interesting is that at first, everyone would tell me, "No, I don't know anyone who has experienced violence," and I would say, "That's impossible." I knew it was impossible, and I would tell them, "Well, actually, you do know someone; you just have to think about it." But what is very interesting is that this was 15 years ago. If I were to start doing this work today, no one would say they don't know someone who has experienced violence. This is ground we have gained thanks to feminist struggles, thanks to the #MeToo movements and the Ni Una Menos movement... That's one of the positive things because we often ask ourselves, "Why am I doing this? Does it make sense? Is any change being generated?" Because there is a lot of pain that you go through, and when you can see those changes, which are not changes produced by a single person, but changes that occur in a network, in a community, there is hope. One is always allied with others, and that is what gives meaning to the work.
Larena, from the series Guerreras, 2013
IL: I was thinking about the length of time that our existence will have in this world, so do you have hope that at some point this work will cease to exist because there will no longer be material to do them, because the violence will change, will be eradicated?
EG: What I know is that once your eyes are opened, it's impossible to look the other way, and there is no other option but to keep fighting. And yes, we always fight with the hope that things will change and that we will make progress. But I believe that stories are never linear, and sometimes we advance and then fall back, and then advance a little more. What I do understand is that these struggles for gender equality are very intertwined with many other struggles, which are always present and often used by right-wing movements to attack us. The bodies of women and the LGBTQ community are always the first targets. I think that when they want to silence you, we need to think about why, what we are saying that bothers them so much that they want to silence us, what is making them so uncomfortable.
Mataji, from the series Guerreras, 2012
IL: What is it about the frontal portrait and these close-ups that you use to represent the testimonies in Guerreras?
EG: I approached this work very consciously in that way because I was trying to distance myself and intervene as little as possible. I wanted the image itself to also be a testimony by the portrayed. It’s a very difficult line to walk because my perspective will always be present, but I tried not to intervene. I always told the women, "As you wish, wherever you wish," as long as it was in their homes, because I was seeking that intimacy that these dialogues between women have. I never incorporated flash or any kind of artificial light and I also said, "Don't clean, don't change anything, don't move anything, let it be as you live." There was never any makeup or anything like that. I wanted it to be them. I mean, there was makeup if they wanted to wear makeup, but there wasn't a makeup artist. I wanted to stay away from all that. And I wanted that directness of looking you in the eye and telling you a story without any interpretation from me, but it’s always a bit misleading to say that because my interpretation will always be there.
IL: Within one of the testimonies in the book Guerreras is that of Say Sacayán, who is a trans-man brother of Diana Sacayan, a victim of transfemicide. Seeing as how we are in Pride Month, could you talk a bit about the new documentary series you're working on about gender identity?
EG: I'm still chewing on that one, although I've been working on it for many years now. It doesn't have a title yet, but it's about identity, gender, and memory. In my work, I delve deeply into the theme of memory, how we reconstruct it. I've interviewed trans men, travestis, lesbians, non-binaries—people who challenge the cis binary norms imposed by patriarchy and capitalism. There's this idea of the "perfect" family within that framework: having a family with children, working, making money... This is an exploration of other possibilities for living our lives. Many people have been invisibilized and criminalized for a long time, but fortunately, we can now hear their stories. So, it's about listening to what they have to say, exploring these other possible lives, other possible families, and simply listening to their firsthand perspectives on how they see the world. The portraits are no longer frontal; they have a much more fluid approach. I'm interested in listening to them, that's it, plain and simple.
IL: Thank you, Eleonora, for putting your gaze here.