BODY WORLDS

Text topic: Cultures of Rhythms and Spectacle

Text author: Биљана Ђоровић

The spectacular exhibition Body Worlds (advertised by the slogan “Phenomenal look at the human-body phenomenon”, which the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens used to commercialize his invention of plastination – process for preserving dead bodies which he ‘sculpted’ by coating them with plastic), is the paradigm for the understanding of objective reality, manifested in the spectacle of placing human corpses in the world of entertainment and show business. 

Body Worlds is a concretized inversion of life, and the last consequence of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. This exhibition renders visible the ambitions of industrial bio-technology to reduce human specimens to the state that can not endanger the existing order. Body Worlds, materialized in the exhibited plastic, zombified forms, might reveal the truth about the anthropological destiny of the western man, in a ritual that ‘liberates’ the human body whose death is preserved and celebrated, by the means of the same perverted science that elsewhere, even more profitably, works to destroy life.