Ilenia Arosio (Alien)
2027: Spring
Alien is a self-taught photographer who also works with video, sound and collaboration. She photographs things that are what they are not. Her work sits on the border between documentary and fiction, where staging, performance, and reality keep slipping into each other. The body is at the center of her practice, along with recognition and the way fantasy gets carried into everyday life.
Her long-term project Bodybuilders maps contemporary drag and club kid culture, looking at costume and drag as practical tools for building an identity and widening the stereotyped idea of “drag.” After an early chapter on the UK scene, she traveled through South America in early 2024 for a few months with support from an Italian Council research grant. She is now working on Bodybuilders 02, a developing archive of performers across the whole American continent. Witnessing, researching, and making the invisible visible is the best answer to the erasure of queer lives.
Since 2015 she has been part of TOMBOYS DON’T CRY, a queer transfeminist platform for art and sound experimentation, where she co-curates the film program Body Language, takes part in exhibitions, and also DJs. She has collaborated since 2018 with SPRINT Milano, an independent salon for artists’ books dedicated to supporting and promoting paper formats.