Las Cosas Nostras is an ongoing photographic project initiated in 2019, exploring the relationship between the female body, cultural power, and the systems through which bodies acquire meaning, value, and boundaries.
The title draws from Cosa Nostra, the name associated with the Sicilian and Italian-American Mafia. Its association with secrecy, prohibition, codes of conduct, and unspoken agreements became a point of departure for examining the unwritten rules governing the female body: where it can appear, how it may be represented, and under what conditions it becomes acceptable. The project traces unexpected parallels between organized structures of power and the ways the body is regulated, concealed, objectified, and pushed to the margins.
Yin Tonic
Feathered
Kiwano
Flowery Bush
The word cosa is central to this inquiry. Meaning “thing,” it reduces the body to something that can be possessed, desired, judged, controlled, or hidden. Like a territory governed by its own codes, the body becomes subject to boundaries that are rarely neutral and whose authority often goes unquestioned. What interests me is not only the existence of these restrictions, but also the silent agreements that sustain them and the possibilities of resistance that emerge from within them.
Verbena
Verbena
Through close-up photography, saturated color, and compositions incorporating flowers, feathers, fruit, and other organic elements, the project develops a visual language that moves between intimacy, abstraction, and confrontation. These visual juxtapositions challenge established associations and invite viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the natural and the forbidden, the personal and the public, the body as a living presence and the body as an object onto which society projects its rules.
Crow Poison
Dreamy Girl
Yellow violet's bell
Rosé
Rather than offering a fixed conclusion, Las Cosas Nostras remains an evolving investigation into possession, secrecy, and the cultural codes that shape our relationship with the body. It asks what happens when something so intimately human becomes subject to a system of prohibitions, and what forms of rebellion become possible when those prohibitions are brought into view.
