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
CORPO-DE-OBRA DOUBLE CHANNEL INSTALLATION 2026
CORPO-DE-OBRA
(BODY-OF-WORK)
— 2026
— TWO-CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION
— TRANCOSO, BAHIA, BRAZIL
— 17 MIN
— PORTUGUESE / ENGLISH SUBTITLES
— DIRECTOR + VIDEOGRAPHER + CO-EDITOR: PENELOPE CORINALDESI
— CO-EDITOR + CONCEPTUAL CONSULTANT: ALI HADDAD
— CONCEPTUAL CONSULTANT: BRANDON ST CATHERINE
WITH
— ALEF
— LEIDY
— VALTEIR
— WALLAS
IMAGE + SOUND
— DIGITAL VIDEO
— FIELD RECORDINGS
— BODY-MOUNTED CAMERA
— INTERVIEWSDESCRIPTION
Corpo-de-obra (Body-of-work) is a two-channel documentary installation following four workers in Trancoso, Bahia, Brazil a former fishing village which over the past fifteen years has been transformed by tourism, land speculation and high-end development. The work was born from a desire to understand this change through the people who physically shape and sustain the landscape.
I was interested in the juxtaposition between workers as active participants in making change, and the fact that they are not always the ones deciding what that change will look like at scale. Through conversations, semi-structured interviews and time spent filming alongside each person at work, the project began to move through questions of risk, pride, housing, land, stability and what it means to imagine a future in a place that is increasingly difficult to inhabit.
I initially intended to make a single-channel film. During the edit, however, I realised that I was holding so tightly to the workers and their subjectivities that I had almost forgotten the land. The second screen came to bring space back into the work, creating a kind of multilogue between worker, labour and landscape.
Across the two synced screens, observational footage, fragmented voices, text, landscape and black screen move alongside one another. At times one screen holds a person while the other holds the place around them; elsewhere, voices emerge over darkness, particularly when speaking about dreams, owning land, building a home and a life beyond work. The work moves between what can be seen, what can be spoken, and what remains provisional or still to be imagined.