Cuerpo que falla

a. Skin

There is a deep-rooted cultural premise, which originates in Plato and intensifies during the Enlightenment, about the superiority of sight over the other senses. In the hierarchy of senses according to Aristotle, sight holds the highest place, while touch is relegated to the lowest level (1). However, touch is our most important sensory system, contained within the skin, the largest organ in the body. It is the most effective protection barrier and our place of openness to the world. We feel through our skin, which connects us to the outside and to one another.

b. Body-history

“Biology is politics,” says Donna Haraway. The body is a tool of power and a vulnerable object. Its natural limit, while vulnerable, has made it powerful in its resistance to capitalism that tries to make it efficient, taking control over its individual and collective strength. The body, in contact with nature, is an inexhaustible source of knowledge:

«There is something we have lost by insisting on talking about the body as a social and performative construct. The vision of the body as social (discursive) production has concealed the fact that our body is a receptacle for powers, faculties and resistances developed during a long process of coevolution with our natural environment, and also of intergenerational practices that have made it a natural boundary to exploitation.”(2)

Federici speaks of the body as a natural boundary. Exposed to evolution in relation to its environment, yet it remains dependent on it: “the need for sun (…), to touch, smell, sleep and make love”. But despite its long evolutionary process, it also has a history: the way it has been shaped and perfected has been determined in institutional settings.

c. 20220123

We hear 20220123 by Ryuichi Sakamoto(3). We hear breathing, barely perceptible. There is someone nearby you don’t see. The body rhythmically rises and falls. Concave, convex.

d. Disputed terrain

A snapshot captures the gesture. That snapshot is not the final gesture, but an instant. It goes beyond the skin, it is the record of a movement and a force that continues its action. Because the gesture that is born in the body does not end in the image. Its forms evade us; they are impossible to grasp. It is neither monolithic nor static. Nor is the partial body represented here: woman. A term whose representations and composition, like the body, are neither fixed nor immutable. Its meanings are continually changing, diverse and may be contradictory. It is not only about performativity or the “embodiment of institutional norms, but also disputed terrain, the object of constant struggle and redefinition”(4). The mode of existence for matter is movement(5).

e. Fragment of difference

Here there is no defined, clear cut fragment. This is not the representation of the body in pieces. But cut out, defined by the material that acts as the medium for a two-sided record. The body fragment, following Linda Nochlin, is approached through difference (6): it is its own, with the dimensions and proportion of a single body. And there is no decision made, no decisive format, no frame or limit to size. It will be the body and the matter, its geometry and proportion, that define.

f. Desecrate the paper

Like St. Thomas doubting visible wounds: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”(7)

g. When images touch reality

The image resulting from the impact of the body on matter touches reality, not only in the resulting image, the one that enters through the eyes, but in the one that remains in the matter (record). It touches reality in the modification of the form and previous image of that matter before being touched. And of the image that is imprinted on it (skin), a two-way force. It generates an object (sculpture) that resists being an image.

Although in the case of another image, we could well convey the question of Georges Didi-Huberman: “Doesn’t our difficulty in orienting ourselves come precisely from the fact that a single image is capable, from the outset, of bringing all of this together and of being understood alternately as document and as dream object, as work and as passing object, as monument and as object of editing, as not knowing and as object of science?(8).

h. Monument

There is a structure that escapes scale. Impenetrable. Pillars that cannot bear a roof. A construction without walls, which props itself up. Like a body. Exposed.