Sotto la pelle is a project born from the urgent need to give voice to eating disorders — painful and complex realities that are too often reduced to a cliché: the superficial desire to simply become thinner. In truth, what takes place is a profound and cruel metamorphosis that affects, tears apart, and inhabits the body, but even before that, the soul.
The disorder becomes a cage that turns every daily gesture into a struggle: food into an enemy, the mirror into a judge, the body into a prison. Behind this obsession lies not an aesthetic ideal, but a hidden pain made of inner emptiness, loneliness, and silence. It is a metamorphosis that slowly consumes, invisible to the eyes of others, carrying within it scars that are difficult to put into words.
“If I lost a few pounds, would I also get rid of the pain crushing me?”
“If I lost weight and disappeared, would anyone miss me?”
The photographs tell the story of this transformed body — fragile yet resilient at the same time — a stage for intimate battles and unspoken cries for help.
The choice of black-and-white analog film intensifies this vision, immersing the viewer in an inner landscape of darkness and suspension, mirroring the torment experienced by those who suffer. Within this space of images and silence, the project seeks to restore dignity to hidden pain, break stigma, raise awareness, and convey empathy and understanding. Because metamorphosis is not only illness, but also the possibility of rebirth.