Eleana Konstantellos

PHROOM

ELEANA KONSTANTELLOS

Chupacabras

In Mexico, in 1996, on high-rating television channels and in newspapers with great circulation, a mythical, fantastic, and surreal being became the protagonist for several weeks: the Chupacabras. It was described as a legendary cryptid that attacked animals, and sometimes people, in rural areas. Its name comes from his blood-sucking habits which consist of depriving his victims of all their blood. This project was born from the hypothesis that the Chupacabras myth served as a smokescreen for the Mexican government in a stage of deep social, political, and economic crisis. Through staged photography (based on the compilation of media material and interviews), I seek to create an imaginary space where I can explore and reveal the mechanisms of construction of the Chupacabras as a social myth used by the media to manipulate and exercise a politics of fear. These pictures represent the pieces of the puzzle that were necessary for the media to create the Chupacabras. With this project, I explore the following questions: How do our governments use the media to hide or reveal information? How do our governments use fear as a weapon of power?

Eleana Konstantellos André (1995) is a French, Greek, and Mexican independent photographer. Her photographic work explores themes such as memory, identity, and contemporary myths. She interrogates photography as an object of memory, oblivion, and manipulation. She uses archival documents and images to analyze past narratives and try to uncover the historical, political, and cultural processes behind them. Through interviews, photographic staging, and archival material, she seeks to create a relationship between past and present. She was a finalist in the Burn Magazine grant, selected in the Descubrimientos de PhotoEspaña, winner of a solo exhibition in Costa Rica, nominated for the Star Dummy Award, and winner of the honorable mention of the PhMuseum Women’s Grant. She has exhibited in New York, Milan, Bologna, Rome, Hermosillo Mexico City, Athens, and Nizhny Tagil, Karlsruhe, and has been published in various print and digital media. In 2022 she was part of an online residency organized by PhotoVogue and the NFT Voice platform. Currently her work “Habitar la lengua” is part of the group exhibition “Update: review of the archive” in Karlsruhe, Germany.