SKIN AS CONTACTZONE - SKIN AS THIRD SPACE BETWEEN OPPOSITIONS - SKIN AS ORGAN - SKIN AS UNCHARTED TERRITORY

Skin is an organ and a surface

Skin is a third space in- between oppositions:

nature - culture
real - symbolic
stability - change
self - other
inside - outside
body - mind

It hides as much as it reveales
It seperattes us from the world as much as it connects us with our surroundings.

Skin is preceived as the mirror of our true self but also as mask.

Skin is a real body part as well as an ever changing locus of inscriptions and interpretations of cultural meaning.

So what are the material and symbolic characteristics of skin?

Bron:https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/62050

The fact that skin is the interface between a feeling subject and the world was neglected.

While skin has been dealt with [...] race, sex, and gender.
Skin as a tactile and sensual organ.

Our largest organ:

Sends out
Receives
Responds
Corporeal conditions - affective states

- Goose bumps
- Shivers
- Sweat
- Blushing
- Lust
- Disgust

Registers
Produces

- Odour
- Taste

Our skin is the most literal sense of a contact zone where we encounter other people and environment. Where various exchanges between self and other - self and world occur. Skin does not isolate us but rather immerses us in reciprocal relations.

Skin is a visual marker of our identity
- It serves as signifier for character traits and dispositions.

Youth - Age
Health - Sickness
Pretty - Ugly
Masculine - Femenine
Racial - Ethnic

Skin is a lieu de memoire as it bears traces of a person’s experiences and emotions but also of alterations such as scars, tattoos, burns, or lacerations. Such marks on the skin tell a story and incite personal and collective narratives and memories. Scars give testimony to individually and/or collectively experienced trauma which is felt and becomes visible on the skin.

Skin is, then, a space for inscriptions and projections.

It is a corporeality and a cultural construction at the same time.

PROBING THE SKIN

In film - art - literature skin has been regarded as a medium and parallels have been drawn between skin and canvas - blank paper, ready for cultural inscriptions.

Artists have used their bodies - skin as a medium, so that the boundary between subject and object between artist and artwork was blurred.