Working through celluloid materials and experimental darkroom practices, the project looks at presence as a condition constituted by residue and haunting. This ongoing archive is not a repository of fixed facts. It follows an often invisible yet perceptible lineage of women who engaged in similar strategies of estrangement and spectrality: singular figures such as Alix Cléo Roubaud, Francesca Woodman, and Maya Deren.
Alongside these visual practices, the writing of Hélène Cixous provides a theoretical and poetic framework for understanding the feminine as force. Her call for a writing of the body resonates with analog image-making as a tactile inscription of desire and vulnerability. Through these photographic tracings, the act of darkroom printing is reconceived as a dialogic encounter across time.
Ultimately, the project proposes new configurations of visibility within image-making. It argues that feminine presence, when approached as spectral, phenomenological, and formally estranged, may reorient perception. By interplaying material processes with embodied knowledge and affective resonance, this thesis offers an understanding as to how the feminine endures as an ongoing, relational, and haunting force: a space in which absence, vulnerability, and persistence are continually re-seen and re-felt.