Through Hardship to the Stars by Ornella Mari

‘Before we recognise ourselves, we often have to survive the versions of us imagined by other people.’

In Through Hardship to the Stars, Ornella Mari turns towards adolescence as a charged and unstable state, a period shaped by transformation, secrecy, desire, fear, and the difficult work of becoming visible to oneself.

Photographed between 2020 and 2024, Mari’s debut photobook moves through a dense and visceral world of spider webs, entangled roots, self-portraits, roadkill, dolls, meat, dogs, bruised knees, open mouths, sharp teeth, and prone bodies. These images return to the predicament of girlhood as something more fractured and alive than nostalgia. Where identity is formed in the space between fantasy, expectation, and lived experience.

Born in Brussels, raised in Hungary, half-Italian and half-Hungarian, Mari grew up with a sense of discontinuity that runs through the work. Named after the Italian actress Ornella Muti by a father who first wanted a son, she began using self-portraiture as a way to perform, resist, and understand the roles placed upon her. The result is a body of work that is intimate, feral, and self-determined, tracing the passage from inherited image to inner recognition.

Through Hardship to the Stars is a book about girlhood, identity, shame, performance, and the fragile triumph of becoming oneself.