Eleana Konstantellos André is a French, Greek, and Mexican visual artist and photographer based between Paris and Mexico City. Her practice merges photography, archival research, and narrative strategies to explore the porous boundaries between fiction and reality. She examines photography as an instrument of remembrance, oblivion, and manipulation. Working with archival documents, staged imagery, and interviews, she creates relational spaces between past and present to uncover the historical, political, and cultural processes embedded in images. In 2022 she co-founded MELKA Collective with Valeria Arendar.
What was the starting point of this project?
When the news story appeared in Mexico in 1996, I was just one year old and living with my family in Paris. Years later, in 2014, when I moved to Mexico, I discovered that a mythological monster had come to life through television channels and newspapers: the Chupacabras. I was deeply struck with the fact that a mythological monster could occupy so much time on newscasts.
At that time, I was working on a project about my maternal grandmother called Doble Olvido. I was submitting my project to different portfolio reviews and the feedback I got (mainly from male reviewers) was pretty much the same: my work was “very feminine.” I suppose it was easy to say that, since I was dealing with themes such as family, care, memory, and gender (labeled as feminine). That label weighed on me because I felt it boxed me into a single perspective, as if I couldn’t speak about anything other than what could be labeled as feminine, delicate, or aesthetic subjects. When I decided to start the Chupacabras project, it was partly a response to that: a way of showing that I could go beyond that supposed “feminine gaze”—whatever that means. I deliberately went to the opposite extreme. My project Doble Olvido was mostly documentary. With this new project I wanted to open my practice to incorporate staged photography. In 2020, I began this project experimenting and creating, with my partner, atmospheres with light, props, costumes and characters in order to create the monster’s universe.
I think it took me so long to start it (the idea for the project emerged around 2018 and I created the first picture in 2020) because I was afraid of the mistakes I would make and the external opinion. I had little to no experience with flash light, production or creating a staged photograph. The pandemic opened up a space for experimentation where mistakes were allowed, precisely because we were isolated from the gaze of others.
I believe that the story of the Chupacabras, although it seemingly refers to Mexico in 1996, carries a timeless relevance. Governments, the media, and oligarchs have always enjoyed using the photographic medium for their propaganda, misleading the public. From the Farm Security Administration to the publication of false photo reports in recent war crimes.
What do you think makes the general public so often fall victim to such deceptive tactics — to believe in the existence of wild creatures, or in fictional narratives that serve the interests of those in power?
I completely agree! I think what’s interesting about the Chupacabras myth is how relevant it still is nowadays. Today we continue to live surrounded by smokescreens, but what attracts me to the Chupacabras is its inherent sarcasm. The Chupacabras appears in Mexico in the nineties, in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis. In a way, the government itself ended up embodying the monster: it sucked the country’s wealth just as the Chupacabras sucked the livestock’s blood. I believe we continue to fall into these kinds of narratives because human beings have a natural inclination toward myths and the fantastic, but also because information is still manipulated to convince us. Projects like Max Pinckers’ Margins of Excess or Jonas Bendiksen’s The Book of Veles address precisely this issue: how photography can construct fictions that feel true (we can also mention Joan Fontcuberta). In Margins of Excess, Pinckers explores six real stories of people in the United States who were portrayed by the media as having fabricated false narratives. The Book of Veles, on the other hand, takes the idea even further, as Bendiksen created a completely fictional project about an alleged fake-news factory in Macedonia. He published a photobook and presented it as a real piece of reportage, and for months no one noticed that all the images were digitally fabricated. Only later did he reveal the deception, exposing how easy it is to manipulate the public. Both projects are very clear examples of how photography can be used both to inform and to manipulate, and of how the line between truth and fiction is increasingly blurred. Today it’s not enough to distrust traditional media: we must also question what we see on our social media, where posts and videos circulate of people citing Chat GPT as a trustworthy source, for example. In a post-truth context, objective facts have less influence on public opinion than emotions or personal beliefs. In other words, what we want to believe matters more than the evidence itself. And the media knows that.
As for your second question, “Why do people fall for these forms of media manipulation?”—that is precisely what I explore in this project. From the outset, I tried to recreate those images to understand, in large part, how the media worked to tell this story convincingly. When the first reports emerged in 1996, they described (and more importantly showed) the aftermath of the monster’s attacks. They displayed the wounds on the bodies of dead animals; interviews featured people who claimed to have seen or heard it. Credibility was reinforced by analyses from specialists, university researchers, and medical professionals who visited the affected areas. With all of this, it was difficult not to believe that a monster was out there sucking the blood of livestock and leaving many families without income. Fear became immediate. In the nineties, with only two main television channels, sensationalist newspapers, and radio programs—and when all media outlets were telling the same story—it was easy for the narrative to be accepted as true. The Chupacabras became a tangible threat because it was said to be attacking families who depended on their livestock, and the information was designed to reinforce that fear.
What are the “Chupacabras” of today?
Today’s chupacabras are no longer flesh-and-blood monsters. However, they still function in the same way: they feed fear and seek to distract us from real problems. In this project it was important to not reveal the monster’s face for two reasons. First, there are different versions of what the Chupacabras look like. Some say it has fur, others that it looks like a prehistoric creature or that it looks like a hairless dog. The second reason was because in that way I could allow the viewer to project whatever they needed onto this faceless monster.
How challenging is it to combine in one body of work staged images — which at times appear so convincing and at other times reveal traces of sarcasm toward historically crude propaganda images — with archival photographs?
I think it’s something that came naturally in my work. From the first project I did Doble Olvido, I started mixing archival material (my family album) and pictures I was making with my grandmother. I feel that way, there are two stories, two points of view or two sides to the same story.
From the beginning of the project, my intention was to revisit the Chupacabras myth not only through the lens of information manipulation, but also by blurring the line between fiction (staged photographs) and reality (archival). What is interesting in the Chupacabras as well is that the archive is also staged. Most proof of the Chupacabras existence was forged by the media. Working with staged photography made sense as well because it replicated the pattern of the story.
We are taught that photography is “truth,” but I deeply believe it is a tool of control—one that manipulates the viewer’s perception from the moment the photographer chooses a frame to the caption that accompanies the image when it is published. I was interested in playing with this fictional truth. Incorporating archival material came naturally: it provides historical context while simultaneously showing how imagery was used to lend credibility to the phenomenon. The staged scenes in the project stem from the analysis of that archive and are essential for understanding how the media operated. From the first reports of the Chupacabras—wounds on animals, interviews with witnesses, analyses by experts—a believable narrative was constructed. My intention with this project is to mix staged photographs with documentary and archival material in such a way that the viewer can never be entirely certain what is real and what is re-created. That ambiguity is part of the message: it pushes us to question our trust in the image and to reflect on how information can manipulate our perception of reality.
You are an artist who presents your work both in book form and as exhibitions in physical spaces. Would you like to share a documentation photo from the presentation of this project at a festival or gallery?
Sure!
I’m always looking for the project to be shown in different ways. I believe that way, the story becomes complete and the public can have a better understanding. It is also a challenge. For instance, during the Recontres d’Arles festival this year, I was asked to translate the project into a video. It was very interesting to think about how the project could be presented in video format.
You were born in France, have a home in Greece, and now live in Mexico. As an artist and professional photographer with a background shaped by quite different environments, could you tell us how you see photography being approached as a medium in these three places?
Having been shaped by these three places, I’ve come to understand photography through very different cultural and emotional lenses. France, for me, was not only the place where I was born but also the structure through which I first learned to interpret the world. My entire schooling was in French—even after moving to Greece—so I grew up within that particular intellectual tradition that insists on questioning images, situating them historically, and understanding their political weight. In France, photography often exists within an established theoretical and institutional framework; it is a medium that is constantly analyzed in relation to its own history and to the discourse surrounding it.
Greece occupies a different register in my relationship with photography. It is where I first picked up a camera—one that belonged to my father—and began photographing instinctively: friends, family, people on the street. Photography there was not an academic pursuit; it emerged organically from daily life. Perhaps because Greece is tied to my family history, my way of making images in that context has always felt more intimate and emotional, rooted in memory, belonging, and personal observation. The photographic culture in Greece, at least from my perspective, is deeply connected to storytelling and lived experience.
Mexico is where my understanding of the medium truly expanded. Moving here allowed me to study photography formally, but more importantly, it exposed me to a way of approaching images that is open, experimental, and often genre-fluid. The boundaries between documentary, fiction, performance, and staged imagery are far more porous. Much of what I’ve learned has happened through friendships—through conversations, shared references, and collective experiments that encouraged me to take risks and to play. Mexico taught me that photography can be a space of invention as much as representation, and that ambiguity can be a productive form of truth.
Across these three places, I’ve come to see photography not as a single practice but as a constellation shaped by cultural contexts and personal histories.
What is the biggest difference in how you perceive the photographic medium today compared to your first photographs back when you were starting out at university?
Without a doubt, the biggest difference is my approach to photography as fictional. When I first started, I was interested in documenting: I took photos on the street and didn’t think much beyond Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous concept of the “decisive moment.” Today, however, I’m drawn to exploring the inherently fictional quality of photography. I’m interested in addressing themes such as memory, gender, and myths—those constructs of reality that we tend to perceive as absolute truths, but are in fact cultural constructions. In the Chupacabras project, for example, this approach to myth becomes very evident. Now I would like to continue exploring mythologies in a more subtle and complex way, without being so obvious.
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