This panel explores the female body as a symbolic and lived space where myth, ritual, vulnerability, and transformation intersect. Working across fashion photography, documentary practice, staged imagery, and conceptual approaches, the artists use the body not as a fixed sign, but as a site where meaning is continuously constructed.
Through performative gestures, archetypes, and carefully built visual worlds, these projects draw on mythology, ritual, and emotional states as well as lived experience. Transformation emerges as an ongoing process shaped by culture, imagination, and self-representation, where strength and fragility coexist and the body becomes a carrier of narrative and symbolic power.
Elizabeth Haust is a Russian visual artist, photographer, and director based between Prague and Moscow. Working in staged photography and fashion film, she blends cinematic composition, symbolism, and psychological storytelling, using haunted spaces and theatrical light to explore identity, memory, and the tension between vulnerability and control. Her work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions, film festivals, and publications, including the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, GUP Magazine, and Dark Beauty Magazine. Haust creates poetic, often unsettling worlds that invite viewers to decode metaphor and confront intimate emotional states.
Isabel MacCarthy grew up by the sea in Norfolk, UK. She lives and works in London. She completed her BA at Central Saint Martins in 2021. Her analogue photographic practice involves portraiture, documentary and staged photography, and often engages themes of Love loss and the many strands of connection between humans and nature.
Shannon Cavarocchi (b. 1997) is a photographer from Oahu, Hawaii now based in Australia. Shannon’s personal work touches on notions of human connection to the landscape, animals, and memory where, often drawing on personal experiences, she seeks to explore the human concerns of emotions, trauma, and healing.
Teresa Ciocia is born and raised in Puglia in 1993, currently based in Paris. Since she was a child, she developed an interest in fashion by watching Movies and fashion shows on TV . Teresa loves to emphasize the shapes of female bodies, playing with light to create an enigmatic and sensual atmosphere. Photography is a means of combining art and fashion with emotional reality.
Turkina Faso is a London-based visual artist working in photography, text, and film. She holds degrees from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow, the Institute of Journalism and Literature, and an MA in Fashion Photography from London College of Fashion. Her project MEandTHEM: Back Home with Alice was published and reviewed internationally. Featured in Numero Russia’s “Top 17 of 2017,” she has worked with YSL Beauty, Vogue, Dazed, and more. Turkina lectures at LCF and is developing her first feature film.
Viridiana is a photographer and visual storyteller from Mexico City, her work is known for its emotional depth and refined aesthetics, crafting intimate and honest visual narratives that connect deeply with her subjects and audiences. Through photography and audiovisual media, she explores themes of identity, self-perception, and human connection.
Moderated by
Marco Pecorari is Associate Professor in Fashion Studies and Associate Dean for Liberal Arts and Research at The New School Parsons Paris where he directs the MA in Fashion Studies. His research focuses on the politics of archives and museums, exploring the intersections of critical theory, fashion media, performance and heritage. He is the editor of the book Fashion in Theory: Historicization, Subjectivity and Practice (Manchester University Press, 2025), author of Fashion Remains: Rethinking Fashion Ephemera in the Archive (Bloomsbury, 2021) and co-editor of the volume Fashion, Performance and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2021). He recently curated the exhibition Ephemeral Matters, Into the Fashion Archive held at the National Museum of Oslo (October 204- March 2025). He is the co-founder of the festival and publication Printing Fashion and sits on the editorial boards of Fashion Theory, ZoneModa Journal, and Bloomsbury Fashion Central. He is also a member of the Scientific Board of the European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA).
