skin

How can you get under some body’s skin? How can you shed your skin and become someone new? Lately I have come across various approaches on the subject of Skin. Several of them entice me.

 

In the design class lead at the AAM last week, Riccardo Blumer talked about the skin as limit-boundary. The skin is what we see of a human – their limit, that by which we can tell they exist.

 

If one thinks about the movie starring Kevin Bacon, “the Hollow man”, the character become invisible, can only be noticed when he wraps himself in an artificial synthetic skin – creating for his inside a new boundary. what I find interesting in this weird story is that once the skin is made invisible we do not see what we expect to lie underneath the skin – organs, muscles, blood vessel- but the whole inside disappears. It stops existing. When there is no boundary from the surroundings there is no more Inside and no Outside, but just one indefinable, imperceptible fudge.

 

Like a city without walls, or a piece of land without a property line, we cannot exist without our skin that delimits ourselves from what surrounds us.

 

But then, if the skin allows us to exist, does it define us as well? It is said beauty is not skin-deep. But more so we, as individuals, are not skin deep. As a city or a country is not defined by its limit we are not our skin. Still our wrapping is our physical expression.

 

So how can we make known our interior? The challenge of communication, of human interaction, is to manage to trespass our skin and reveal what lies beneath it, ourselves.

 

A Dutch dance company I used to dance with, Dattah Dans, is now working on a project on this precise subject.

 

 

Playing with our skin means understanding it as a physical limit and as an image. It means understanding what the interior – ourselves – is and what lies beyond, in order to allow a flow from the inside out and from the outside in.

 

In R Blumer’s design studio, we are now working of crafting leather in order to make it show its limital character. A piece of leather becomes a simulation of the skin. What I find interesting in this is that skin – as physical representation of a content – has to become a representation of itself.

 

I imagine one of the traps that many things and people fall into during the game played with their skin – that of identifying themselves with this skin, with their image. Italo Calvino’s city of Tamara is a lady and a city as such. Inside her everything is a symbol of something else. One can only perceive Tamara as a sum of the images she projects about herself. But is Tamara only the sum of these images?

 

At best, this trap means becoming skin-deep. At worst it means devoiding oneself of content. As in JL Borjes’ story of the 1:1 map of a city (“on exactitude in Science”) and in Baudrillard’s theory on simulation, one ceases to exist beyond their representation. Thus the representation remains without a subject, without backup, it becomes a representation of nothing. If we were talking about a gas-filled balloon, if there were nothing on the inside the balloon would implode. It’s funny though how, nowadays, such cases of subject-less representations continue to exist.

 

There is a serious problem when we cannot understand our skin for what it is, when our image remains our only reality. The “wrapping” in itself may exist, but it is nothing unless it wraps something in and lets something out. A limit is nothing if there are no two realities it divides. Each of the three elements is necessary for the others to exist. We need our skin in order to exist as individuals separated from an outside. In the same way, however, we need to acknowledge ourselves in order for it to make sense to have a skin that separates us from something else.