Virginia de Diego
index, publications
cv, portfolio, PhD
postcards
bio, contact
2026
It all started with a pregnancy test.
A pregnancy test, a growing belly and a question: how to present and not represent? Not just to present but to be present. To have a relationship with others; to be, to be present. Not “being in the world” but “within the world.” To be a part of it. Photography as an (inter)social medium.
It all started with a wound.
A C-Section.
It all started with a click.
I don’t remember when I started taking pictures (with permission) with my father’s camera. I remembered taking my first picture with it after being able to unlock the camera, not knowing exactly how. The magic of the shutter sound, how excited and proud I’ve felt. I still remember the image.
It all started with a humiliation.
I started practicing daily photography with a very cheap camera. It was during summer that my practice truly got started. In the walking up and down the beach, and while I was taking the pictures, my mother used to vilify my practice: “this is unethical”, “somebody is going to hit you if you continue taking pictures”, “if you keep on doing this I am leaving”.
It continued with humiliation, disguised as a joke.
It was not meant to be a humiliation but the wound was there. I kept on taking pictures with my very cheap, vignetting, toy camera. I kept on using old cameras. Lenses full of fungus. Developed amateurly and digitalized likewise. Some friends started mocking me saying ‘I liked to take bad pictures’. Was this due just to non-knowledge or a self-imposition because I did not deserve to be ‘good’? Was it a blocking of the canonical knowledge? Was it, precisely, a rejection and repositioning of the norm, the disciplined, the canonical?
It all, really, started with a wound.
But not the wound I thought. Not the c-section. But the wound: if I kept doing this – photographing – people will leave. But I persisted.
Photography was, at the same time an anti-social medium. An affirmation of my own presence-ghost. A way not to be touched because, how to touch a ghost? The camera was in the way to others, blocking me to connect. Kept me from contact and still a way to try to reach. Then I started to use-not-use the camera. To stay close enough that things blurred, that I could no longer step back.
It all started with a possession.
The voice stayed within – if you keep doing this I am leaving. Silence. Distance. Avoidance. Ambiguity. Sacrifice or Immolation. Compliance. Disappearance. Performance. The camera: behind were all that happened.
I carried my wound. I carried my ghost. I carried the camera everywhere. Then I’ve tried to break free. Then, a land in between: I discovered that ‘possessed’ was, too, named ‘enthousiasmos’. Joy was a naturalized possession. Being affected was not being dominated. Being possessed meant I had the force of various.
And then, a first consented possession, the first time it was light, not a burden. A pregnancy.
It all started with a lineage of qualified knowledge.
Them, the men. Resourceful men: my grandfather, my father. Them, the ones in charge of the apparatus – my uncle knows about this very much, too. The constructors of the gaze. The ones in charge of the camera. The blocked camera from my father. The unattainable camera from my grandfather – guarded by my mother. Them, the women. Blind women – my mother, her grandmother, her great-grand mother before her. And then, myself. Shall I perform men so I can be qualified to use a camera, to have a vision on my own? Shall I drown in that feminine tradition of blindness? Shall I construct, then, an identity around the erasure of women by men? But I persisted on grabbing the camera. And I persisted and defended my own blindness – myopia as the Benjaminean nearness – and constructed an epistemology of non-ocular knowledge.
As I couldn’t look directly, I began to see diagonally and dreams appeared, years later, when I was able to feel. Is it my body, my nipples, a pair of eyes? Is it possible to have physical contact with the image? Is it the image physical contact?
It all started with a discovery of a genealogy.
A 20.000 years old engraving of a woman: the first female ever on surviving a C-section, at cave Cussac, France.
It all started with the discovery of witches.
Disrupting social (patriarchal) order, escaping institutional (ocular) knowledge. Being prickled, scanned for marks – any mole, any spot. I reconquer their apparatus, evict it from its former function. Use it as a wand.
I finally have elders.
It all started, actually, with pleasure.
With an explosion: an orgasm.
Ungraspable images, possessed apparatus. Pleasure as a way to know with no distance, the bureaucracy of the machine expelled from its violence. Flattening— but not submission and, at the same time, submission. Pleasure breaking the system. An unreadable body, a glitched evidence.
This started with a text as an in–between.
(from A Lineage of Disqualified Knowledge (IV))
Untitled
(from A Lineage of Disqualified Knowledge (IV))
Untitled
(from A Lineage of Disqualified Knowledge (IV))
Untitled
(from A Lineage of Disqualified Knowledge (IV))
Untitled
(from A Lineage of Disqualified Knowledge (IV))
curated | Estefânia r. de Silva
Galería Adorna (Porto, PT)
With works by: Bárbara Fonte, Luisa Sequeira, Estefânia r.
VENUS (I have never taken self-portraits) (installation views) (2025)
Parto e Permanência,Galería Adorna, Porto, PT,
Parto e Permanência,Galería Adorna, Porto, PT,