[ Intention & pesentation of projet ]    -     [ Meeting with Gilles Virget ]   -     [ Work in progress ]

QUESTION OF IDENTITY

This project is to be taken as a work of art whose aim is to raise questions about a person's identity and the integrity of our body. But also about the mutational aspect of our body, because our body is in constant évolution. It will change in a large way in the next years, and could becoming more abstract.


THE CONCEPT OF SKIN-TERRITORY

This project was to have been called 'Skin Mail Order Selling', but the term 'territory' makes the project's main concern more clear. The skin is a metaphor for territory. Our skin-envelope permits us to exist as a territory distinct from the rest of the world. Who has control over this space?

However, it is not the whole of the skin that interests me here, but how once divided into fragments it turns into a satellite-picture of an unknown country whose substance is ourselves. Even if it is possible here and there to recognize parts of the body, these isolated elements become autonomous entities. The little territories fit together and come apart on the surface of our body, and in the end distort it, give it an air of something floating free.


THE ETHICS OF IDENTITY AND SALES

There may well be some irony in this project forwards mail order firms who works so hard to make everything indispensable. The idea is to turn the mechanism on it's head, to sell the unsellable, which is also an essential factor in the definition of identity : our skin.  

In electronic form, the metaphorical sense of this activity is extended since it is not a matter of the actual sale of pieces of skin, but of making it possible to appropriate, in a virtual sense, the body of another person. Why should one wish to buy a piece of someone else's body?

One may note the analogy with pimping inherent in the sale of someone else's body. Our economic and social system is largely based on such a pattern of exploitation of the Other. The body is sold cut price, each skin part only cost 30 €. This is a form of body liquidation.


IS IT OBSCENE ?

Obscenity is the third important notion that the project concerns itself with.
First because of the possibility to have untroubled access to all the parts of a person's body. This type of obscenity is banal and can be linked to the common voyeurism which haunts us all. And yet this first impulse is quickly disappointed. Despite being able to see everything, the image that is sought is never truly visible because of the fragmentation of the body into sections which are so small as to form an obstacle between the body and the desire it provokes.

Obscenity also derives from the actually cutting-up of the body, which is visually a matter of aesthetics but which perhaps conceals the work of a perverse, absurd butcher. This act of 'carving up' is made all the more evident in that each piece which is detached in this way is meticulously described and catalogued.

ABSURDITY

This brings us to our final point that of absurdity. This whole construction of a body which is cut up, catalogued and sold is so grotesque as to become profoundly funny.

[ Intention & pesentation of projet ]    -     [ Meeting with Gilles Virget ]   -     [ Work in progress ]