ARS ANATOMICA

Body is a central concept in Western history. For transgressors, physical punishment and isolation from other bodies. For witches, bodily disintegration through cleansing fire. For saints, immortalization embodied in material artifacts. Underlying the religious and political aspects of embodiment lies the disseminated conception that ours is a discrete body. Its limits clearly defined by our skin, making up for materially individual beings. Neither integrated nor merged with nature but almost a Newtonian object, so individual in itself to the point that it is possible to mathematically describe its dynamics and kinetics. But if Newton had an important role in shaping our cultural interpretation of physical bodies (ours included), Descartes had yet a major part to play in this regard. His efforts to establish the boundaries between body and external world altogether with the mechanical view of our organic aspect, greatly contributed to the individuation of the human body. Not only is our body a machine-like artifact, it is a hermetically sealed one, Descartes would say. So much so that we do not perceive the physiological aspects of existence: digestion occurs out of sight; blood flows unnoticeably. Exposing such processes inspires repulsion and discomfort because it exposes the breaches in the armour we have been building for centuries. Blood spills and vomiting force us to wonder that maybe (just maybe), we are not that discrete in relation to the world after all. Through mapped projection of internal organs on the surface of the so-called individual bodies we expose the flaws in our construction around this material carcass. Were we constituted in a way our leaking squishy parts were placed outwards, maybe we would perceive ourselves as more integrated to the biosphere and maybe that would have prevented the damage we have caused other organisms simply because we see them as ‘others’, distinct bodies. Through technology we here invert Descartes’ approach to non-human bodies which, for him, were mere machines and, therefore, could be dissected alive. If vivisection of human beings is definitely out of question it is because we do conceive ours as a differentiated kind of embodiment. By photographing this projection-mediated vivisection of anthropo bodies in opposition to actual dissected non-human ones,  our very nature is up for questioning. Curiously, by promoting the cartesian nightmare, we endorse Vesalius’ dream of opening up the tissues of our constitution and exposing our elementary anatomical structures. The implications of such debate are even more dramatic if we take into account the efforts of Vesalius, an iconic figure in anatomy history, to be able to study human composition in a time when bodies were even more sacred and, therefore, not allowed to be opened and have its parts shown to the eyes of the living. Between Descartes and Vesalius we propose this biological artwork: in the frail zone that makes it possible to question our material composition while rethinking the immaterial layers of its constitution.