• Y — ・✶ Chiara Francesca Rizzuti ✶・

✴︎ 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.

12.41 The legendary “Yeti”, Dharmapala Thangka Centre, School of Thangka Painting.

Yeti scalp, John Angelo Jackson during the “Snowman Expedition” (1954), from his book *Adventure Travels in the Himalaya*.

Yeti painted by Phurba Chitten Sherpa of Namche.

Ursus arctos isabellinus (orso bruno dell’Himalaya). Incisione naturalistica, XIX secolo, attribuita a R. Kretschmer.

A 1975 paleoart painting by Czech illustrator Zdeněk Burian depicting *Gigantopithecus*, the largest ape to have ever existed.

Comparative anatomical illustration titled "Hair tracts on the arms and hands of man, as compared with those of the chimpanzee," taken from the works of George John Romanes (in texts such as *Darwin, and After Darwin* or similar publications from the late 19th or early 20th century).

Expedition members at the 17,300-foot camp. Top, left to right: Wollaston, Howard-Bury, Heron, Raeburn; bottom, left to right: Mallory, Wheeler, Bullock, Morshead. Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston (1875–1930), celluloid negative, MEE21/0396.

Government regulations for expeditions searching for the Yeti in Nepal.

Indian zoologist and ornithologist Biswamoy Biswas examining the alleged "Yeti scalp" kept at the Pangboche monastery in Nepal during the 1954 *Daily Mail* expedition.

A famous 1951 photograph taken by mountaineer Eric Shipton during a reconnaissance mission on Mount Everest, showing a footprint in the snow alongside a boot to provide a sense of scale.