The social, historical and cultural dimensions of the skin in
Brazilian art and literature.
No one can get out of their skin. This popular saying expresses the fact that each person has a skin. Each skin is therefore unique. It is a non-transferable document. Acting as a record, it details aspects of an individual and a collective memory. Each skin possesses a sensitivity that touches and it is touched by the world. It mediates temperature fluctuations, and is marked by cuts, accidents, and its own history. Skin marks us in the world, giving us the outline of individuals.
"Invented skins" is the result of a research process in art and literature that considers the social dimension of texts and images throughout cultural memory. How it has a materiality when it appears in images, is narrated or scanned, but also in its quality of image, appearance, and the textures that are formed from its property as tissue and organ. This book shows that skin is a biological reality that occupies a physical and psychic space, but also unfolds in the imagination. A skin is something artists and writers have to invent from the fact that each person has a skin and is capable of making one. In the history of humanity the idea of skin came from a later paradigm of race. So far, race has had a solid relation with history, establishing categorical hierarchies whose purpose was to accumulate wealth and establish a point of view free from the notion of race itself. It is as if race were debatable from the most diverse categories of non-white people, from outside the hierarchical scale. Before getting into inventing skins, it is necessary to recognise two distinct processes that are part of its context.
Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira (born 1978 in Fortaleza, Brazil) is an assistant professor of literature, art and media at the University of Zurich and a member of the Latin America Center Zurich and the Center for Arts and Cultural Theory.
