Deconstructing The Standards Of Perfection

Edge of Humanity Magazine

2 hours ago

Photographer Giulia Filippi is an Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Perfectly Imperfect’. To see Giulia’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Under pressure
How to recover from a burnout with a therapy based on firewood. Self-portrait, 2023

Too much heart for such a cold world.
Self-portrait, 2025

Softness Test
Because life is hard. Self-portrait, 2023

‘Perfectly Imperfect’ is a self-portrait project that questions, deconstructs, and reinterprets the visual codes, aesthetic standards, and sterilized social models of contemporary life that are imposed on us daily.

For years, Giulia felt out of place, as if there were a model to follow that didn’t represent her. Then she realized that within that fracture lay her most authentic self.

She began working with her image to convey what cannot be seen, what we tend to hide, and what doesn’t conform. She was raised in an era where perfection is currency and im-perfection means exclusion: we are not allowed to be fragile, suffering must not be shown, fear is only for the weak, and stepping outside the frame draws too much attention.

Failure is almost taboo.

Burnout
You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again. Self-portrait, 2023

The botany of disobeying
In a world that demands sanitized bodies and linear paths, “Botany of Disobeying” stages a poetic, silent fracture. Encased within the geometric, artificial grid fishnet stockings, a symbol, a symbol of adult scrutiny and social rules, the legs become the ground for a natural insurrection. Hundreds of daisies, vestiges of an altered innocence, disrupt the pre-set pattern, refusing the imposed order to bloom freely, asymmetrical and vulnerable. The flawless grass in the background contrasts with a body reaffirming its own biological imperfection. This is not a simple self-portrait, but a powerful act of visual resistance: proof that authentic identity sprouts precisely where the system attempts to contain it, turning defiance into a joyful celebration of life. Self-portrait, 2025

Endless beauty
Inspired by Amedeo Modigliani. Self-portrait, 2022

What she tries to do is approach these themes in a new way: she loves to flip the perspective. Each photograph is a staged fracture: of identity, of symmetry, and of social expectations. The body becomes a vehicle for emotion, reflection, and provocation, a tool to speak about identity, social pressure, fragility, and resistance. If the self-portrait represents the moment of identification and acceptance of the image, then the environment becomes a mirror and container of identity. She aims to create a visual space where she can be free, vulnerable, and sometimes unsettling. Human.

She uses conceptual and surreal language to distort, overlap, erase, and exaggerate.

Not to hide, but to reveal. Each image is a question, a gesture, and an attempt at dialogue with the viewer.

I try to find beauty

in things that are IMPERFECT.

Like ME.

llusions that save us: blooming from within
“Illusions that save us” is a visual refuge: I gather myself in the peace of silence, where what is fragile slowly gathers itself for an inner flight, necessary, powerful.
I bloom from within, and in illusion I find the truth that sustains me. Perhaps you’ll recognize our own hidden momentum, that bud waiting for the light of your gaze to unfold. Self-portrait, 2025

Self-Dought
“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then
by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait, 2022

Artist Statement:

The perfect geometric figure, the circle, is broken in her logo.

This symbol is her mirror: it reflects herself and her vision of the world, and it is always associated with her slogan “I try to find beauty in things that are imperfect. Like me.”

She has always felt dissatisfied with how today’s society communicates.

She felt “wrong” for many years in a world that demands perfection and promotes values of absolute flawlessness (in bodies, thoughts, careers, and families...) until, after years, she simply learned to accept herself and turn all her inadequacy into a strength.

She brings the same poetics into her art.

She began to distort everything she was given by society: everything seems to be too perffect, too schematic, too pre-set, too symmetrical and at the same time so terribly unreal.

Always hovering between realism and surrealism, between irony and riddles of the modern man, Giulia mixes bright colors to give life to an environment where thanks to her art and, above all, thanks to multiple self-portrait techniques, she can feel more comfortable, free and real.

Bio:

Giulia Filippi (aka Iovi Sacra Art) comes from Italy and is 36 years old.

She studied Visual Arts at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Milan, and later moved to the multicultural and artistic city of Berlin, where she studied German and photography and took a career-oriented training and coaching course.

Thanks to her creativity, attention to detail, and ability to illustrate different themes, she had the opportunity to work as a freelance illustrator, photographer, and model, while simultaneously working in art galleries, museums, and fashion agencies.

She has organized many art exhibitions independently, won several international competitions, and her artworks have been exhibited and published in Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Finland, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Canada, China, South Korea, Japan, and the Metaverse.

In 2017, she began studying Graphic, Digital Design & Communication in Vicenza, Italy.

Today, she works in digital art and visual design.