PENELOPE CORINALDESI
Director, Researcher,
Image-maker and Editor
email: penelopecorinaldesi@hotmail.com
Instagram: @penelope.corinaldesi
I am a London-based visual artist and filmmaker working between documentary, experimental cinema, and research-led practice. My work explores how personal and shared histories surface in urban and domestic spaces. I approach events as existing in an aesthetic realm, using filmmaking, the screen, and other media not only as vessels of transmission but as tools for questioning violence, intergenerational trauma, and the politics of space. Through investigative reconstructions, mixed documentary strategies, and multimedia layering, I attempt to expand what visual media can do.
I studied Social Anthropology (BSc) and City Design (MSc) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and hold an MA in Performance: Screen from Central Saint Martins (UAL). This academic grounding shapes my approach to film and visual research, allowing me to move fluidly between ethnographic observation, theory, and practice - without ever fully leaving one behind.
CV
BRING UP THE EARTH EXPERIMENTAL FILM 2025
BRING UP THE EARTH
— 2024
— SHORT FILM
— LONDON, UK
— 02:30
— CO-DIRECTORS: PENELOPE CORINALDESI + AVANTIKA SOOD + DARIYA HUTSALYUK + ELIZABETH ZERIHUN
IMAGE + SOUND
— 16MM FILM
— ANALOGUE FOOTAGE
— ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE
— ARCHIVAL SOUND
— MUSICDESCRIPTION
Bring Up the Earth is a work that meditates on the exclusionary and selective practices embedded in core–periphery relations of production and consumption in the city of London, using the frame as both material and metaphor.
Shot on just 100 metres of 16mm film, the piece embraces the medium’s constraints to reflect on the frame as a conflicted space — where some realities are centred, and others pushed to the margins. What cannot be shown becomes as significant as what is visible.
To gesture toward these absences, archival fragments are introduced, bringing their own layered histories. These are placed in tension with newly shot material, opening a dialogue between systems of extraction and the urban centres that sustain them — focusing on three entangled sites: coffee, cobalt, and oil.
What emerges is a fractured, provisional resolution — a portrait of London that acknowledges both what is seen and what is systematically excluded.
The city, like the frame, is never neutral.