Cyril Caine & Anita Volker

Geography
of the After

Clinics of Otherness

Photography · casting · video · installation
Exhibition project · 2026

Look again.
Look better.

Manifesto

Transforming the weight of the gaze into a space of recognition

Geography of the After / Clinics of Otherness emerges from a shared territory: the altered face, the repaired body, and the traces left by accident, war, surgery and the social gaze.

Our work does not document medical cases. It considers what remains after the shock, when a face must return to public space and withstand the gaze of others.

We bring together portraits, wrecked car bodies, casts, surgical fragments, overexposed images, film stills and paintings. Skin, metal, plaster, canvas and light become surfaces for the same question: how do we look at what has left behind the fiction of wholeness?

This is not a project about disfigurement.
It is a project about the gaze - its violence, unease and avoidance, but also its capacity to change.

Journey

A shift
in the gaze

The portfolio unfolds as a passage: from object to face, from impact to trace, from imprint to clinical threshold, and finally to forms of survival.

I The frontal gaze
II Impacted matter
III The organic trace
IV Imprint and ghost
V The clinical threshold
VI Survivals

The frontal gaze

Human presences that do not ask for compassion, but for a gaze that holds.

Frontal portrait of a man with a visibly altered face — **InvU / Cartography of Impacts**Cyril Caine2011 · Pigment photographic print
The face appears as a threshold of the gaze, outside any medical or pathological reading. The presence is not explained: it is held.

Front of a wrecked red car — **InvU / Cartography of Impacts**Cyril Caine2011 · Pigment photographic print
Metal folds, dents and bears marks. It becomes the face’s material counterpoint: a wounded surface that retains the memory of impact.

Mural made of one hundred portraits of children — **Between the Shadows That Separate Us**Anita Volker2018-2022 · Photographic mural, 600 × 300 cm · Wall print / installation

Portrait of a child against a blue background — **Between the Shadows That Separate Us**Anita Volker2018-2022 · Pigment photographic print
Childhood reveals how the social gaze is learned: what we are taught to see, judge, avoid or sustain.

Impacted matter

Metal, glass, car bodies: wounded surfaces that retain the memory of impact.

Windscreen and car body deformed by an accident

III

The organic trace

Skin, bark, detail: the face becomes a sensitive territory.

Detail of a scar on a face — **Between the Shadows That Separate Us**Anita Volker2018-2022 · Pigment photographic print
Like skin, flora retains a memory of pressure, loss and resistance. The wound moves beyond the face to become a writing of surfaces.

Portrait of a teenager against a blue background

Imprint and ghost

Casts, masks and deposits: the portrait leaves resemblance behind and becomes an apparition.

Self-portrait with the face erased by light — **Self-Portrait #04 / The Unfigured Face**Anita Volker2009 · Black-and-white pigment print
The face withdraws into light. It becomes a surface, an imprint, almost an absence.

Painted mask surrounded by dark fabric — **Mask / Cyril Caine Self-Portrait**Anita Volker & Cyril Caine2024 · Facial impression, cast, papier-mâché and acrylic paint
The portrait becomes a second skin: a fragile presence between relic, apparition and disappearance.

Deformed cast of a face — **The Unfigured Face**Anita Volker & Cyril Caine2014 · Direct impression, cast, photography / installation
The cast suspends the face between sculpture, absence and memory.

Portrait almost entirely dissolved in light — **The Unfigured Face**Anita Volker & Cyril Caine2025 · Pigment photographic print
The face dissolves into light. It does not disappear: it becomes an apparition.

Fragments of facial casts deposited on the floor — **Depository of Faces**Anita Volker & Cyril Caine2024 · Casts / fragments / installation
A deposit of traces: archive, relic, landscape of absence. The portrait leaves identity behind and becomes a material of memory.

The clinical threshold

The surgical origin of the gaze becomes mental and material substance.

Surgical team during a facial transplant — **Operating Room - Facial Transplant #02**Anita Volker2005 · Still from a video filmed in the operating room · First partial face transplant in France, Amiens University Hospital
The facial graft appears between harvesting and transplantation: a surface awaiting recognition.

Facial graft held according to surgical protocol — **Intraoperative Archive**Anita Volker2005 · Arrival of the facial graft

Clinical portrait at the end of surgery — **The Patient / Intraoperative - Facial Allotransplantation / Portrait #03**Anita Volker2013 · Black-and-white pigment print
The image stands at the threshold of care: after the surgical gesture, before the return to the social gaze.

Serial composition of twenty-five self-portraits in a surgical cap — **The Patient / Self-Portrait #01**Anita Volker2012 · Serial work, 25 views
The self-portrait questions the standardisation of the face, clinical protocol and the position of the caregiver’s gaze.

Survivals

The wound meets history, war, painting and forms of repair.

Interview excerpt

The Face to Come

Before facial allotransplantation · Amiens University Hospital

Excerpt from an interview conducted with Ms B. before her surgery. She would become the third person to receive a facial allotransplant in Amiens.

Her words capture a particular moment: the one preceding transformation, when the medical procedure is still a possibility and the future remains open.

Watch the film ↗

Ms B. speaking before her facial allotransplant

Watch the film ↗

Experimental film

InvU

Cyril Caine & Anita Volker · 2011 · 4 min 14

InvU transforms Cyril Caine's photographic portraits into a visual poem of torn and recomposed faces, where disfigurement becomes the subject of a sensitive investigation into how our gaze can hurt, classify, or repair bodies.

Watch the film ↗

Still from InvU, projected and recomposed faces

Watch InvU ↗

Experimental film

AMOK / Dark Room

Cyril Caine & Anita Volker · 2015

A camera obscura of the face: fragmentation, apparition and the return of the image. The film opens the body of work onto an inner temporality, between erasure and survival.

Watch the film ↗

Short documentary

The Torn Soldier

Cyril Caine & Anita Volker · 2024

Volodymyr, a former basketball coach who became a Ukrainian soldier, was wounded in the face by war. Here, the repaired face becomes a site of history, dignity and survival.

Watch the film ↗

Volodymyr walking at the edge of a forest

A dancing hand filmed in black and white — **Prelude for a Dancing Hand**Anita Volker & Cyril Caine2026 · Experimental film, colour video, sound / possible installation
A hand appears as an autonomous body. It hesitates, searches, breathes and dances: what remains able to touch, feel and speak when the face or voice withdraws.

Watch Prelude for a Dancing Hand ↗

The duo

Anita Volker
& Cyril Caine

Photographers, filmmakers and visual artists

Brother and sister, Anita Volker and Cyril Caine have developed a shared body of work since 2011 around the face, visible difference and the social gaze. Their practices bring together photography, film, painting, casting, installation and sound.

Their work explores the relationships between the body, its image and the norms that shape its representation. It asks what images allow us to encounter in another person, and how images themselves can orient our perception.

Geography of the After / Clinics of Otherness brings this research together in an exhibition form combining portraits, casts, materials, films and sound. Traces of accident, surgery or war meet individual experience and the gazes directed towards it. Their shared approach is grounded in duration, in relationships with the people represented, and in sustained attention to the conditions under which they become visible.

Anita Volker

Filmmaker
and photographer

Anita Volker develops a practice at the intersection of art, medicine and care. Trained in documentary filmmaking at Ateliers Varan, she previously worked for fifteen years as an operating-room nurse, mainly in maxillofacial and reconstructive surgery at Amiens-Picardie University Hospital.

This experience informs an art-science practice combining photography, film, archives and installation. Through the face, the imprint and traces of transformation, she explores the relationships between body, identity and the social gaze.

Her work pays particular attention to encounter and to the conditions under which a person becomes an image. This research runs through the photographic series Between the Shadows That Separate Us and the documentary Et alors !, about three teenagers born with a facial difference.

Cyril Caine

Photographer, filmmaker
and visual artist

Trained in visual arts and cinema, Cyril Caine has developed, since InvU, a research practice centred on frontal portraiture, beauty norms and the relationships between body, matter and accident. His work spans photography, cinema, painting, sculpture, casting and sound composition.

His images bring faces into relation with wrecked car bodies, urban landscapes and transformed materials. These juxtapositions explore impact, trace and the persistence of forms while preserving the singularity of the people represented.

With Anita Volker, he develops photographic and film works and installations that extend this research into transformations of the face and the experience of looking.

Transforming the weight of the gaze into a space of recognition

A shiftin the gaze

The Face to Come

InvU

AMOK / Dark Room

The Torn Soldier

Anita Volker& Cyril Caine

Filmmakerand photographer

Photographer, filmmakerand visual artist

A shift
in the gaze

Anita Volker
& Cyril Caine

Filmmaker
and photographer

Photographer, filmmaker
and visual artist