・✶ Chiara Francesca Rizzuti ✶・

 (she, they, he)
A human being based in Bologna (IT), curious about new ways of thinking about our future to create a new society and what we don't know yet, such as death, consciousness, and life, with an anthropological approach to photography.

@paraseleenium
chiarafrancescarizzuti@gmail.com

✴︎ about ✴︎

✴︎work ✴︎
• ongoing •
  1. Y・2026
  2. MYR・2020
  3. a natural diary・neverending I hope
  4. the atypicals・2021
• artistic residencies •
  1. Helios・2025
  2. Dōmo - Kitsune Love Hotel・2021
 • before •
  1. Del Sublime・2019
  2. Hai quasi trent’anni・2020
  3. Non avevamo null'altro da fare・2018
  4. Apnea・2016

✴︎ installation views ✴︎

✳︎ commissioned ✳︎

✴︎ paper sheet ✴︎

✴︎ commercial ✴︎

✴︎ contact ✴︎

✴︎ good company ✴︎


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✶






✴︎ Y・2026 ✴︎

This is still an embryonic project centred on the figure of the Yeti, understood not as a creature to be verified but as a threshold: a liminal presence that questions the boundary between human and non-human, between scientific knowledge and local cosmologies, between evidence and storytelling.

The aim is certainly not to establish whether it exists, but rather to focus on the mystery itself—on what the myth reproduces and narrates. It is a living archive of fears, desires, colonialisms, Western projections, and Indigenous narratives. It is a body that refuses to be captured and, precisely for this reason, destabilises the modern classificatory obsession, questioning hierarchies of knowledge, dynamics of appropriation, and the construction of otherness.

The Yeti has often been transformed into a symbolic trophy of Western exploration; through photography, I attempt to restore it as a relational figure, inscribed within the territories and communities that name it. The mountains are not a backdrop but subjects. The snows do not conceal; they safeguard. In this research, the photographic image is not conceived as proof but as an act of listening and a symbolic universe of exploration. The work thus becomes a space where, above all, the narratives of those who live alongside the Mystery bring to light not Western positivism and its answers, but rather a new way of engaging with the unknown, with faith, and with Nature—even when it may be potentially devouring, and always mysterious.

This work therefore, does not seek the “monster.” It seeks what its shadow makes visible: our need for boundaries, our fear of hybridity, our nostalgia for an elsewhere not (yet?) domesticated. In this sense, the Yeti is a figure that opens possibilities rather than closing them: a presence that resists colonial capture and invites a rethinking of the relationship between human beings, nature, and imagination.

In October 2026, I will develop the project during a residency in Nepal at Space A in Kathmandu, working with photographic and documentary archives related to Himalayan expeditions, media representations, and the iconographic stratifications of the Yeti. These materials will be placed in dialogue with an original photographic production focused on landscapes, details, interstitial spaces, traces, and absences. As always in my practice, an anthropological approach will be adopted, supported by ethnographic research tools such as interviews, fieldwork, documentation, and reporting.

Tom Bourdillon, one of the mountaineers on the 1951 expedition.
Via  anomalyinfo
Chinese drawing of the yeren, dated 1986. The Chinese Text reads: “A picture of the ‘yeren’ in Shennongjia drawn by scientists based on data”.
© Chiara Francesca Rizzuti