An Eritrean girl walks along the railway connecting Eritrea to Ethiopia. Many Eritrean children grow up without a parental presence because their parents have either emigrated or are serving in the military. As a result, these children feel compelled to leave and seek a new life abroad, often attempting to reunite with parents who have already left.
2025 Photo Contest - Africa - Long-Term Projects

Women’s Bodies as Battlefields

Photographer

Cinzia Canneri

Association Camille Lepage
23 March, 2019

An Eritrean girl walks along the railway connecting Eritrea to Ethiopia. Many Eritrean children grow up without a parental presence because their parents have either emigrated or are serving in the military. As a result, these children feel compelled to leave and seek a new life abroad, often attempting to reunite with parents who have already left.

In 2017, Cinzia Canneri began documenting the experiences of Eritrean women who were fleeing their country and seeking refuge in Ethiopia. Young people in Eritrea have been migrating in huge numbers in recent years to escape a repressive regime that has implemented what is effectively an indefinite mandatory conscription. Many women caught at the borders were assaulted, raped, or shot in the stomach by national police to prevent them from having children. 

As war between Ethiopian government forces (supported by Eritrean military and Amhara militia) against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) swept through the Tiray region, Canneri’s scope broadened to include Tigrayan women, who were now joining Eritrean women in their flight from northern Ethiopia to refugee camps in Addis Ababa or Sudan. Both groups have been the targets of systematic sexual violence – rape, shooting, torture – that, due to social stigma, limited health facilities, and journalistic access, remains insufficiently reported by news media and understood by the world at large. 

In January 2024, Canneri co-founded Cross Looks, a collective of Italian, Eritrean, Tigrayan, and Sudanese women building an intersectional narrative around issues of gender, class, race, and other forms of social inequality. By highlighting the life stories of women from both ethnicities as they struggle to heal and reconstruct their identities, this project is in line with the mission of her collective, embracing a different conception of the figure of “the body as a battlefield.” Not just a facile call to empowerment, the body as a battlefield represents a complex process in which strength arises from care, resilience, and, when necessary, resistance and combat.
 

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Cinzia Canneri
About the photographer

Cinzia Canneri is a photojournalist based in Italy who specializes in stories about the human condition, social change, gender and immigration issues. Having worked extensively in the Horn of Africa, she has photographed the condition of women from a political, social and cultural point of view.  Over the years...

Read the full biography

Jury comment

This project amplifies the voices of the women affected by the war in the border region of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan, with remarkable depth and care. The jury was impressed by the photographer's commitment to the story and the trust she fostered with the Tigrinya women she photographed, shedding light on their underreported experiences. Despite working within a challenging media landscape marked by misinformation and difficulty in gaining access, the work offers a rare, intimate perspective, balancing the weight of the subject matter with moments of beauty and tenderness. Furthermore, the photographer’s self-reflective approach—evident in the strong captions, thoughtful sequencing, and acknowledgment of her positionality as an Italian woman in a region shaped by Italy’s colonial history—adds further depth to this powerful work, balancing the weight of the subject matter with moments of beauty and tenderness.