ESMERALDA KOSMATOPOULOS

Touch is our first and earliest sense. It operates thru a direct physical contact that, during a brief moment, abolish the distance that separates us from otherness, be it a person or an object. We only consider real what we can touch. However, nowadays we live in a world that our senses only very partially explore: we found ourselves too often immersed in a virtual non-place where digital images take the place of our bodies and where touch is restricted to the sliding of our fingers on a screen. We are losing touch.

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The project "Caressing wall"s takes a new look at a common but nonetheless, less and less frequent gesture - that of the hand that caresses - to explore the contemporary meaning of touch and its limitations. This exploration draws it source from the concept of the skin and looks at its profound ambiguity: the skin as the place and means of communication with the Other, but also as the border that prevents us from becoming the Other; the skin as a surface smooth and soft, yet also porous and dotted with millions of points of entry and exit to the outside world; the skin as a simple body envelope, but one that can reach our deeper self just from the feel of a caress. These ambiguities also bring to light the limits of the caress itself. From pleasure to pain, from union to cannibalization, “Caressing walls” tells us about our human vulnerability.

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We often hear the phrase "inhabit your body" that compares our physical presence in the world to a house. Our skin would therefore be its wall and foundation, serving both to divide and protect. The exhibition appropriates this metaphor of the skin as a wall to create an immersive artistic journey thru photos and other three-dimensional installations. Each work mixes oversized photos of pieces of skin printed on multiple supports, sculptures of touching and touched hands, and various objects found in construction sites and demolished building. The walls, bricks, fences, ladder, metal bars mixed with the shreds of our own body envelope become the faces of our limits, giving them shape and power, sensuality and softness.