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
FEATHERBONES EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY 2024
FEATHERBONES
— 2024
— EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY
— 05:01
— DIRECTED BY: SOPHIE KLAMPFERER + PENELOPE CORINALDESI + P. AVANTIKA SOOD + TIANA TE-RONG HSU
IMAGE + SOUND
— DIGITAL VIDEO
— BODY-MOUNTED CAMERAS
— INTERVIEWS
— FILMMAKERS’ COMMENTARY
— RECORDED ENCOUNTERSDESCRIPTION
Featherbones follows four women filmmakers entering London's Smithfield Meat Market at night — a male-dominated space where access isn't guaranteed. Shot guerrilla-style, the film documents negotiations over who belongs, who gets to film, and what it costs women to enter spaces built on masculine labour and legacy.
The directors worked guerrilla-style. No permits, just persistent presence and conversations that gradually built trust. The workers decided whether to let them in or shut us out. Some opened up. Others didn't. That tension between access and refusal structures the entire film. They carried our own equipment, shot handheld, recorded sound ourselves, edited collaboratively. All four of them worked as directors, cinematographers, editors, and sound mixers. No hierarchy. Collective negotiation determined what the film became.
The narration comes from on-site interviews layered into an experimental soundscape — voices mixed with machinery, footsteps, knives on steel. The sonic density mirrors their physical experience: surrounded by sounds they didn't control, navigating a space where our presence was constantly noticed and assessed.
Misogyny surfaces throughout. So does unexpected care. The film doesn't resolve these contradictions — it holds them. By refusing hierarchical authorship, the directorsmirror the film's inquiry into who gets access, who holds power, whose perspective counts.
Featherbones observes without judgment. It creates a portrait of gendered space and what it costs women to enter it.