In RE:Birth, Valeria Cherchi addresses the issue of obstetric and gynecological violence and the trauma that arises from it, in its individual, social, and political dimensions.

The project is rooted in a personal story: the death of the artist’s namesake sister at just six months old due to an unreported episode of obstetric violence. This event becomes the starting point for an investigation into the phenomenon. Through her research, Cherchi creates non-linear narratives that invite critical reflection on the events she recounts, bringing to light power dynamics tied to systematic forms of negligence and oppression. Her work proposes spaces of resilience, drawing strength from solidarity and peer support.

The work-in-progress is composed of 44 materials from family archives: 22 photographs and 22 documents. Newly created images illustrate maternal experience and the relevant places, both in a documentary and speculative form.

Among the themes explored are transgenerational trauma and the impact of perinatal loss on fathers, who were interviewed in collaboration with a psychoanalyst. These reactions are represented through underwater visions that evoke the isolation that often accompanies such experiences.

In Aluminium (WATCH THE VIDEO), the artist invites her father to perform inside his workshop, a place where she herself spent her childhood by his side. The work symbolically and viscerally stages the violence of the delivery room.

It transposes this experience into an industrial, raw, everyday environment: the workshop as an emblem of the working class, aiming to highlight the intersectionality of obstetric violence a form of abuse that manifests differently depending on social class, gender, and the body.

In collaboration with the Hungarian organization Emma -a national women’s association advocating for fundamental rights and social equality for women in the realm of sexual and reproductive health and rights- the artist has documented, through photographs and video (WATCH THE INTERVIEWS), the role of doulas within the Roma community of Alsózsolca. These figures not only offer essential support to mothers before, during, and after childbirth but also act as crucial witnesses against violence and racial discrimination within the healthcare system, shedding light on dynamics that are often silenced.

Best photobooks of 2020

– Simon Baker on Photobookstore and Vogue Italia 

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– Edie Peters on PhotoQ – World Press Photo

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– Manuela Accinno – Rolling Stone (Italian)

Some of You Killed Luisa attempts to decode the complex structure of the kidnapping phenomenon that has crossed the artist’s homeland, the Italian island of Sardinia between the 1960s and the 1990s almost 200 people were
kidnapped for ransom.

On the 16th of June 1992 the upper part of a human ear is found by a priest on a mountainous road in Barbagia, central Sardinia, while a young boy, Farouk Kassam, is spending his fifth month in a hidden cave. He is held captive by a group of masked strangers. He is only six years old and about the same age as Cherchi. Like most kids, she was also terrified of being taken away from her home. Eleven years later, Luisa Manfredi was shot dead on the balcony of her flat. She was 14 years old and the daughter of Matteo Boe, Farouk’s kidnapper. No one was ever charged or convicted for her murder, which remains a mystery until this day.

How to tell a story bound by uncertainty? How to talk about histories that are just partially ended and shrouded in silence?

Valeria Cherchi is one of the few artists to deal with this dark chapter of Sardinian history by exploring the parts of the story that appear reliable. After several years of field research, interaction with local communities, digging of media archives and her family’s video tapes, she presents a kaleidoscopic story mixing photos, video stills and a log of her research, where memories, sociological and anthropological observations wittily mingle. The outcome of is a multilayered examination that states the importance of Cherchi as a witness of a community bound by the ever-present law of omerta.

The outcome of is a multilayered examination that states the importance of myself as a witness of a community bound by the ever-present law of omertà.

ISBN: 978-94-92051-53-0
250 × 200 mm | 240 p | EN
Softcover

Publisher: The Eriskay Connection
Images and Text: Valeria Cherchi
Editing: Photocaptionist, Valeria Cherchi
Graphic Design: Fabian Bremer

O Lord, open our lips

(2014-2015)

The depersonalising perception of the figure of the priest is a common phenomenon carried out by both religious and non-religious people. It is the result of two widespread non-declared schools of thought which support the idea that priests are exempt from two features which are crucial in outlining an individual’s personality: interests and mistakes.

On the one hand, non-religious people are unlikely to imagine priests outside the context of the church or any other religious environment, almost struggling with the idea of a clergy person developing personal interests and passions. On the other hand, worshippers tend to discharge pastors from the common human fault, as though strengthening their faith by picturing the priest as a saint.

Being a priest is not only a vocation but also a job, one which requires a most powerful uniform: cassocks, white collars, mitres… are like potential labels, giving us the pretentious privilege of a straightforward knowledge of the individual who wears it. But how accurate is this knowledge? How much is there that we do not want to understand? How much easier is it for us to see the stereotype, compared to the effort we would need to make to understand the real essence of these people?

The two terms ‘woman’ and ‘priest’ are easily definable but difficult to understand in depth as both contain various codes, too complex to be decrypted. Two of these codes are femininity and spirituality, and they are the ones I have decided to explore in order to outline these women’s individuality. The purpose of the project is to stimulate a debate about who these women really are. What are they allowed to do? What not? Are they mothers? Wives? Lovers?

We open our lips to breath, to eat, to drink, to kiss. We should always open our lips to speak out, and we should always be listened. By building deep relationships with my subjects I aim to reveal details of their lives, details which operate as hints of their womanhood and priesthood, of their interests and their mistakes.

I used to

(2012)

The project is about an obsessive return to the past, about the luminous clarity of childhood, the fleeting turbulence of adolescence, and the way memory shifts under the weight of emotion. It investigates the fragile objectivity of time, acknowledging how recollections become distorted, softened, or intensified as they resurface. A sudden scent, a distant sound, or an unexpected texture becomes the catalyst for a pleasant disquiet, triggering memories once held at the edges of consciousness.

Developed through an imagined return to the artist’s childhood landscapes in Sardinia, the project combines these reconstructed places with vernacular family photographs and scanned pages from personal diaries. This assemblage produces memories that are only partially true: they merge lived experience with the imaginary and intertwine with fragments of narratives belonging to people close to the artist. As a result, the work generates an emotional space where individual recollections overlap, making it impossible to distinguish personal memory from that of parents, friends, or relatives.

Ultimately, the project examines self-knowledge through the lens of remembrance while reflecting on the transience of time as lived duration. By blending conscious and unconscious imagery and allowing instinct to override linear logic, the work seeks to evoke a formative state of life – one in which memory, perception, and imagination coexist in continual transformation.