Pippa Filippa

Fig. 22

On the 13th of March 2026, I underwent a breast reduction. What began as an instinctive decision unfolded into a complex physical and psychological process that reshaped my understanding of control, self-image, and embodiment. Throughout the making of this project, my sense of agency has shifted between being a subject, maker, and object. I came to understand my autonomy not as something fixed, but as something continuously negotiated, internally, physically, and within broader social and cultural frameworks. This raised questions about how decisions concerning the body are formed, and how they are never entirely separate from their context. The work moves through this experience as a non-linear process shaped by emotional and physical transformation. My body becomes a site where control and uncertainty coexist, where intention and lived experience do not always align. Through a series of images documenting bodily change, internal conflict, and clinical spaces, I trace a shifting relationship to my own body. Photography became a way of coping with the process: a means of staying close to the body while also creating enough distance to observe it. Through this, I examine the pull between altering the body for comfort and well-being and facing the conditions that made such a change feel necessary in the first place.