VENUS IN A PRETTY SHELL

Female characters in literature and film are predominantly written in a stereotypical way, with little agency or depth. These patterns don't just reflect a sexist culture, instead they reinforce it. It matters for women and girls to see complex characters that represent them, not just recycled archetypes built around a patriarchal gaze. This gets worse when you consider how few women and queer voices are actually behind the camera or on the page. This project maps a selection of character tropes onto specific figures from film and literature, and the images are deliberately cold and still, figures that feel closer to empty shells than real people, because that's exactly what they are.

Published in NASTY MAGAZINE

Photography/Creative Direction/Styling: LUCALUCA.studio

MUA: Henriette Aue
Models: Masha Kobchuk
Margot Heyer at Neu Casting
Joan Lingli at Letitgo Mgmt

Archiving Beauty act 01

In today's society, the pursuit of beauty and the fear of losing it are omnipresent. Cosmetic surgery is marketed as a lifestyle product, and beauty trends spread at lightning speed via social networks. This urge to resist the natural evolution of one's own body calls into question the process of transience. How do we archive our fleeting beauty?

Shot in an old GDR archive space in Berlin, the project explores the idea of archiving as an act of self-reflection. Soon to be torn down for new, younger constructions, the building’s last breaths are captured – depicting an unsettling beauty of once-present, but now lost knowledge, hidden away and accessible only to a select few.

How do we archive our own beauty?
To map something that is perceived across such a spectrum of self-conflicted definitions – to then sort it in a manner that makes sense and allows to recall collected data at any point needed – to then actually reaching the point to recall what you previously learned and being able to apply it. To archive such a topic, tainted by personal perception and simultaneously a matter of public discourse, is a mission set up to fail. We are left with a question to answer for ourselves: Between what we think we know, what we consider axiomatic data, and our own emotional truth, do we still see clear or does our perception of beauty has a pre-applied smoothing-filter?

Published in NASTY MAGAZINE

Creative Direction, Set, Editing: LUCALUCA.studio
Photography: Evelyn Bencicova
Styling: Maikel Luka
MUA: Sara Cabezas Molina
Models: Mimi Thoma via Miha Modelmanagment
Marlene Schneider
Assistence: Lina Reinsch & Niklas Pick
Ice for Setdesign via Eisfabrik Berlin