BELLA CARDIM

Imprinted (2023)

Imprinted is a series of photographic self-portraits that records temporary marks left on the skin by clothing, pressure, and everyday contact. Photographed at close range, fragments of the body become landscapes, revealing surfaces shaped by gestures that are often too ordinary to be noticed.

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The work continues my investigation into the relationship between the body and the structures that contain it. Clothing is meant to cover and protect, yet it also compresses, divides, and leaves visible traces. These impressions disappear from the skin, but the sensations and meanings associated with them may remain.

By isolating these marks from the body as a whole, the photographs shift attention away from recognizable identity and toward the body as material, surface, and archive. What appears temporary becomes evidence of repeated pressure, suggesting how external expectations can be absorbed until they begin to feel inseparable from the body itself.

Imprinted reflects on the distance between what passes and what remains, and on the subtle ways the body carries the memory of what has touched, shaped, and constrained it.