filters
This chapter documents my practice of changing perspective and multiplying the ways I look at a body. Often we look at the body from an anatomical perspective, and this approach reduces the body to a very narrow concept. Looking through different lenses/filters, reveals different sides, characteristics, parameters and dimentions of what a body can be. Depending on which filter is used, the body becomes something else.
In this work I play with the classical attributes of maps, using their codes and language to translate the different approaches. Each approach, each filter, each perspective, is linked to a specific type of map or drawing.
I also borrow the traditional practice of using one single body as reference prototype for all maps, like in traditional anatomy books which all use the same image of a white muscular men, following the body esthetic of ancient Greece. (see Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, and other diagrams from western medicine and anatomy books).
This practice doesn’t make any sense to me, as it promotes the idea of one „normal“ body, and ignores the situatedness, the uniqueness, and the subjectivity of bodies. In response, I place another body as reference: my own (which is not very different from the traditional reference body, as it is also white, slim, muscular and able-bodied), but it is a first step of reappropriation. As a dancer my body is my instrument of investigation and is therefore my starting point. Of course, these filters could be, and should be applied on many different bodies.
The practice of placing a body under many different filters also brings the question in which position this ‘reference’ body is represented. Again, I want to disrupt the conventional representation of the body, standing in a symmetrical schematized position, and I searched for another position which shows my body in a looser, softer, more personal and casual way. This is my reference base map.
In most of the conventional representations, the body is shown from the perspective of someone looking at another body, alienating them from the picture, instead of taking the perspective of how the viewer feel/see their own body. The viewer has to switch mentally the sides of the image to make the drawing fit their body. I think this might be a reason why many people have a hard time remembering on which side of their body their organs are. So I decided for all anatomical drawings to use a mirrored representation of the body instead of the conventional one, because I believe that way it is easier for our brains to transfer the image to our own body.
