Reclaiming Venus

Medium-format photography series, 2025

^{Reclaiming Venus is a medium-format photography series created in collaboration between Dalia Jacobs and Ludovica Anzaldi. Conceived and directed by Jacobs, who also inhabits the images as subject, the work reclaims the archetype of Venus through a Palestinian lens.

“I stand in front of the lens as subject and author. My body becomes a political territory, reclaiming Venus through a Palestinian frame. The kuffiya and watermelon are not symbols of ornament but of resistance, survival, and defiance. These images strip away myth to confront erasure, insisting on presence and continuity.”

Shot in the Mediterranean Sea, the series places the Palestinian body within a landscape carrying its own histories of mythology, movement, borders, and belonging. Yet the relationship with water is also deeply intimate. The body does not simply appear against the Mediterranean; it enters it. Water holds, surrounds, reveals, and partially conceals the body, creating a space between vulnerability and resistance, surrender and reclamation.

For Jacobs, the Mediterranean carries a particular tension: a sea known through proximity and memory, yet one that remained inaccessible to her for much of her life. Entering its water therefore becomes more than a setting for the photographs. It becomes an embodied encounter with a landscape that is at once intimate and historically unreachable.

Through this relationship between body, water, and image, Venus is reclaimed not as an inherited ideal to reproduce, but as a figure through which questions of gaze, territory, femininity, erasure, and presence can be renegotiated. Jacobs occupies the image simultaneously as its subject and author, while the collaboration with Anzaldi complicates the relationship between who looks, who is looked at, and who determines how the body is represented.

Reclaiming Venus insists on presence and continuity: the body remains, enters, occupies, and refuses disappearance.

Photography
Ludovica Anzaldi

All proceeds from Reclaiming Venus are directed to Palestine.}