BELLA CARDIM
My life has always revolved around food, both personally and professionally. The flavors, the gestures, the social and emotional rituals surrounding meals have always occupied me. Over time, I came to understand that food was never just food. It was affection, reward, proof of love. It was also control, discipline, and performance. To eat was to belong, but also to regulate, to negotiate, to remain acceptable. These contradictions shaped my relationship with food and, later, with art.
For eighteen years, I worked as a commercial food photographer in Brazil, immersed in the aesthetics of desire and consumption. During that time, I began to sense that behind the polished surface of food imagery there were deeper tensions: restraint disguised as pleasure, performance disguised as nourishment. Gradually, my gaze shifted from the plate to the body, from surface to structure. Food became not only an object of contemplation, but a language carrying inheritance, intimacy, and social codes.
My practice investigates eating as a cultural, emotional, and political act. I am interested in how it carries structures of belonging, guilt, desire, and discipline. Through food, we learn how to behave, how to restrain ourselves, how to desire within permitted limits. It reveals invisible norms and patterns that shape our bodies, our emotions, and our relationships.
My research begins with lived experience but connects to collective dynamics: the persistence of beauty myths, the moralization of eating, the medicalization of appetite, and the subtle mandates imprinted on the body. I work across photography, sculpture, textile, and installation. Materiality plays a central role. Fabrics, threads, domestic objects, and fragments of the body become ingredients through which I elaborate inherited narratives and give form to what cannot always be spoken directly.
Repetition, embroidery, and handwriting appear as gestures of resistance and rewriting. They are ways of digesting inherited narratives, exposing hidden layers, and activating embodied memory.
Food is the point of departure. What I ultimately address are the structures that feed us, shape us, and, at times, quietly suffocate us.
