Martina Cirese
Do Women Dream of Synthetic Kids? interrogates the uncanny world of Reborns: handmade, hyper-realistic baby dolls that have been produced since the 1990s and have been collected by over 20,000 women worldwide. This phenomenon led me to reflect on the concept of surrogate love and, within the context of our (post)modern understanding of motherhood, to question the very nature of what it means to be human.
In an ongoing research into the manufacturing and collecting of Reborn dolls, I discovered that the massive and global appeal of Reborn dolls is stimulated not only by both collectors but also by individuals who regard them as “therapeutic” tools used to cope with experiences of abortions, infertility, trauma or social isolation.
My project brings together a series of unfamiliar, staged photos envisioned during the conversations I had with members of the Reborn community whom I met across Europe between 2017 and 2019. Inspired by the work of German artist and photographer Hans Bellmer, who created life-sized female dolls in the mid 1930s, I dismantled and repackaged the dolls into an artificial bag-like amniotic sacs –to subjectively express how human longing and emotional need can be commodified and transformed into market goods.
MARTINA CIRESE studied at the ISFCI (Institute of Photography – Rome). In 2011 she was given a scholarship to complete a Master’s degree in Contemporary History at the Sorbonne University in Paris, focusing her studies on the raise of Totalitarian regimes. From 2012 she has worked as a freelance photographer, publishing cover stories in leading Italian magazines. Her first long term project Asankojo has been acknowledged by several awards nominations. In 2014 she was awarded a year-long scholarship at FABRICA, the communication research centre founded by Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani, where she has been selected as the photographer for the Unhate Foundation – United Colors of Benetton global social campaigns. Her works have been exhibited across Europe and featured in international publications including “L’Espresso”, “Internazionale”, “The Guardian”, “Time”, “National Geographic”, “GEO” and “Burn”. *She was born in Rome in 1988, and lives and works in Paris since 2017.