Alessia Glaviano: Your work has long reclaimed the female body from the conventions of the male gaze, presenting sensuality as something self-authored rather than performed for an external viewer. In Retail Ritual, you turn that gaze towards yourself at the precise moment when motherhood can make a woman feel newly visible in some ways and invisible in others. How did becoming a mother complicate your understanding of being looked at, desired, and represented?
Carlota Guerrero: I have temporarily stopped wondering whether I am desirable. Motherhood is making being looked at feel less important, but also more complicated. My body has become public in very practical and medical ways, while no longer feeling entirely mine. It is functional, shared and occupied, but also miraculous, something to celebrate, even after being cut open by a C-section, full of new shapes, bruises, milk and blood.
AG: There is still a powerful cultural assumption that motherhood replaces, or should replace, a woman’s erotic identity. In these photographs, the maternal body enters spaces designed around seduction, aspiration, and idealized femininity without renouncing any of them. Were you consciously resisting the idea that becoming a mother makes a woman less sensual, less desirable, or somehow no longer entitled to perform femininity for herself?
CG: Actually, I was resisting something else. I was resisting staying at home inside an endless loop of care and cleaning. Going to places that clearly weren’t meant for us at that moment gave me an adrenaline rush. It was a decision.
When you think about it, there isn’t much for a woman and her baby to do in a city, so I claimed those spaces for us. Carmina loved the expensive carpets and the mirrors. Who would have thought a baby could have such a good time in a temple of luxury…
