life in scale (carmen) [2023-]
digital photography (iPhone)

A digital photography archive of the life of carmen. It is a companion to life in scale (kali zirikli).

carmen (lowercase), alongside kali zirikli, is one of the personas I work through. She is a woman in red who is in a constant state of dissolution, an embodiment of chaos as a creative force. She is always about to be reborn.

When she regresses to age 14, she gets mixed with blue and turns purple. When she regresses to age 5, she gets mixed with white and turns pink. She belongs in an institution - a museum or a psychiatric hospital - but she’s outside.

Images have lost meaning so she hangs on to the color red. She crochets to turn her bloody insides outside. Her world is between the real and the dream. She photographs her life with her iPhone. She can’t tell her own gaze apart from the algorithmic gaze. She’s compulsively self-creating her image. Where kali zirikli shoots analogue and stays out of reach, carmen’s images are made and shared digitally.

The project builds on Romani women’s gaze and reverses a history of being photographed and imagined by others. It treats authorship as control over how an image is made, seen and shared. It is part of my exploration of the Romani woman’s body between two patriarchies, European and Romani: the first exploits and objectifies, the second shames and urges to cover up.

Images from this series appear in my free-form novel carmen.