Touching Skin

A phenomenological discussion of two projects, by artists Anna Walker and Jo Milne, focusing on the skin of the body as the skin of the world

Forfattere

Nøgleord:

Michel Serres, Touch, Death, Sculpture, Photography

Resumé

Our contact with the world exists at the skin’s boundary of the self. But as theorist Donna Haraway asks: “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (1985, p. 178). Reflecting on Haraway’s words, Anna Walker analyses the photographic images of her bruised body layered onto the bones of animals: Bruised Ecology (2024); and Jo Milne discusses new artworks, Cytocdysis and Reticularae (2024) that at first glance appear to be flayed skin, oozing and vulnerable after desquamation.

Forfatterbiografier

Anna Walker, Plymouth University

Dr. Anna Walker, Plymouth University, Transtechnology Research, is a multi-disciplinary artist/researcher. She was awarded an MFA from Southampton University, 1998, and a certificate in Psychotherapy, CBPC, Cambridge, 2010. An interest in the effects of trauma on the body, developed during her work as a psychotherapist, led to a PhD in Arts and Media, completed in May 2017. Recent publications include: “Revisiting Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographs to reimagine the noise of hysteria,” Transtech Reader, December 2024; “When things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold,” Monad: Journal of Transformative Practice, December 2024.

Jo Milne, Universitat de Barcelona

Jo Milne is a visual artist with a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Barcelona. She is a researcher and lecturer in Visual Creation at EINA, Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) and also lectures at the Universitat de Barcelona. Recent publications include: “Thinking with Bookworks: The Making and Sharing of Artist’s Books to Generate Relational Networks,” Archaeology and Anthropology, Vol. 4-3, 2022, and “Spot the Difference, A reinterpretation of Lily Kolisko’s Stiegbildmethode as a creative methodology for capturing the unseen,” Bric a Brac, 6., 2023.

Referencer

Anzieu, Didier: The Skin Ego, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980.

Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography, New York, Hill & Wang, 1982.

Connor, Steven: “Michel Serres’s Five Senses”, paper given at the Michel Serres conference at Birkbeck College in May 1999.

Despret, Vinciane: “Afterword: It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared” in Extinction Studies, Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew (eds.), New York, Columbia University Press, 2017, pp. 217-222.

Didi-Huberman, George: “The Figurative Incarnation of the Sentence (Notes on the “Autographic” Skin)” in Dermographia and the inscribed body, Cabinet, Spring Issue 13, Futures, 2004. https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/didi-huberman.php

Hannula, Mika, Suoranta, Juha, Terra, Váden: Artistic Research. Theories, Methods and Practices. (1 ed.) Helsinki, University of Gothenburg and Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 2005.

Haraway, Donna: “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York, Routledge, 1985, pp. 149-181.

Haraway, Donna: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham/London, Duke University Press, 2016.

Kristeva, Julia: Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

Levinas, Emmanuel: Otherwise than Being or Beyond Existence, Alphonso Lingis (trans.), The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1990 [1981].

Marks, Laura: “Loving a Disappearing Image” in Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques/Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, vol. 8, no. 1-2, 1997, pp. 93-111.

Marks, Laura: The Skin of the Film, Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham/London, Duke University Press, 2000.

Nancy, Jean Luc: The Ground of the Image: 51(Perspectives in Continental Philosophy), Jeff Fort (trans.), 2005.

Serres, Michel: The Five Senses, a Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, New York/ London, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.

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Publiceret

2026-06-23

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