Giulia Gatti, Corazonada, 2026

“Corazonada is intuition – that thing which exists before emotion, action and the effect it has on the heart.”

Corazonada is a project by Giulia Gatti, conceived during the months she spent on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, southern Mexico. A land that has been the subject of numerous accounts and depictions by travellers, scholars and artists, driven by a desire to discover a society known as ‘matriarchal’. There, Gatti had the opportunity to get to know some local women who showed her the true nature of their lives, behind the façade of conventional portrayals.

These women were portrayed by her, and she established an active collaboration with them to bring to life a project that aims, with every photograph, to deconstruct the traditional, patriarchal and colonial narrative of women. And so the women at the centre of her images are active participants in the portraits; using their bodies and movements, they enact new versions of a canon that has been imposed upon them by the gaze of others, subverting tradition and becoming the heralds of a new system of power.

Play, dance, eroticism, magic, the hunt and the female gaze are the undisputed protagonists of this work, which positions us as spectators who are never entirely passive and never safe from those gazes – ours and theirs – as sharp as blades and as lethal as rifle shots.