Marie Castagnola

A photographer with an outstanding academic background, Marie Castagnola is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP) in Arles. Her work exists at the intersection of documentary writing and fiction, questioning the aesthetic codes that separate reality from its representation. After moving to Ukraine in 2019, she is now based in Berlin, where she continues to explore geopolitical and human tensions through her lens.

Her artistic approach is a profound analysis of the notion of domination and its symptoms, which she tracks through human, animal, and architectural bodies. Her acclaimed project, To my friends – Ukraine 2022, demonstrates her ability to capture the quest for freedom of a youth caught in the grip of war. For Marie, the image is a tool for measuring the relationships of control that humans maintain with their environment. Between intimate moments stolen from the night and meticulous urban landscapes, she composes a body of work where each shot suggests the limits of our interactions with the world, transforming social observation into a visual proposition of great poetic power.

For her residency at Rocabella, Marie Castagnola proposes a visual research project titled 'The Architecture of Control.' Faithful to her exploration of the symptoms of domination, she aims to analyze the estate not merely as a holiday destination, but as an architectural body exercising a form of mastery over the Mediterranean landscape. The domain, with its tamed gardens and imposing villas, serves as the ideal laboratory for questioning the boundaries between human construction and the wild state of the coastline.

The project focuses on two main axes. The architectural and botanical body: documenting how Rocabella's neo-classical architecture 'frames' nature and the sea, creating a tension between human will for control and the untamable vastness of the azure. Presence and absence: capturing transitional moments within the estate, where the bodies of residents and staff interact with this monumental structure.

Through a series of photographs playing on the ambiguity between documentary reality and fictional staging, Marie Castagnola aspires to reveal the site's political and symbolic dimensions. At Rocabella, she seeks to capture that breaking point where aesthetic harmony meets the rigor of control, offering an unprecedented portrait of the estate as a sanctuary that is as protective as it is dominant.