‘Bella’

Bella comes from Ciao Bella, a greeting that often slips into catcalling, revealing how casually sexism is woven into everyday life. In many languages, bella means ‘beautiful woman’, but within patriarchal systems, women are only allowed to exist as Bella—bodies that are visible, desirable, and measurable.

In a world overwhelmed by images, women’s bodies are stripped of agency—circulating through blurred pornographic imagery, AI-generated deepfake pornography, and mass media, where the female form is endlessly reproduced as a commodity.

I blur faces and abstract forms as an act of refusal—resisting identification, possession, and legibility, making the body remain uncertain and unresolved. Here, a female body is a quiet site of resistance where beauty and violence intertwine.

Can the female body exist outside the systems that define and consume it? If eroticism has always been shaped by the male gaze, what would it mean for a female eroticism—one that is claimed, not assigned—to exist at all?