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To survive the contemporary art jungle, I try to imbue my curatorial practice with shamanic and liberating strategies. Oftentimes literature is the place where my associations of ideas begin to shape the scaffolding of a project.

For this edition of Elles x Paris Photo, I landed on the territory of the OuLiPo, the legendary Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, whose members, a mixture of writers and mathematicians, compose works using constrained writing techniques as a means of triggering inspiration. I decided to extend the selection to the book sector, because for a woman it seems easier to publish a book than to be represented by a gallery, which means that there is still work to do in the photography market.

The title Women In Motion reminded me of the importance of legs, as they enable movement through walking. In the old Neapolitan board game La Tombola , inspired by the tradition of La Smorfia (grimace), in which dreams are analyzed and converted into numbers to play in a lotto, the number 77 corresponds to “women’s legs”, as if they should all be long and thin. The number 77 is also associated with none other than the devil in La Smorfia .


I hope, dear visitors, that you will enjoy navigating the fair to discover the 77 artists presented here all together in a purely visual sequence. If possible, keep a vigilant eye and be suspicious of numbers, words and above all images… See you next time in a post-quota society!

Federica Chiocchetti

Federica Chiocchetti is a writer, curator, editor and lecturer specialising in photography and literature, historical and contemporary. Through her platform  Photocaptionist she collaborates with international museums (Jeu de Paume, V&A, Kunsthalle Budapest), private collections (David Solo, Archive of Modern Conflict) festivals and fairs (Jaipur Photo, T3 Tokyo Photo Festival, Paris Photo), publishers (Spector Books, Aperture, Foam), bookstores (La Fabrica, Shakespeare and Company) and universities (University of Oxford, ECAL), among others. She holds a PhD in ‘Photo-Texts’, from London’s University of Westminster, which she is transforming into a touring exhibition, book and educational project, the Word and Image Workshop. She has won a number of residencies (Fondation Michalski, Cité internationale des arts), awards (Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book, Vienna Photo Book Dummy) and in 2016 she was included among the ‘ 16 female curators shaking things up’ by Artnet. Her research on women in photography was presented in multiple forms by L’Uomo Vogue, Fotomuseum Winterthur, 10x10 Photobooks, London Art Fair and The Photographers’ Gallery