BELLA CARDIM

Peril is a series combining photography and installation to examine the emotions that emerge when the body is confronted with its own weight. The simple act of stepping onto a scale, repeated throughout a lifetime, becomes a territory of tension.

​

At the center of the work is a bathroom scale covered with metal thumbtacks. An object designed to measure the body becomes physically threatening, exposing the violence that can be embedded in an apparently neutral instrument.

​

The scale does more than register weight. It produces a number through which the body may be judged, compared, disciplined, or assigned value. The work considers how repeated measurement moves beyond physical information and enters the construction of identity and self-perception.

​

Peril examines the danger of reducing bodies to numbers and the emotional burden produced when measurement becomes a constant form of surveillance. What appears to be an ordinary domestic object reveals the social pressures carried into the private encounter between a body and its weight.