‘Sense’: to feel, to mean; when both are lost, all that remains is the inert body.
This work consists of photographs of fragments of human corpses that show, in detail, the sensory organs, and through the use of color filters, create a different panorama from the one we are accustomed to seeing.
It is through the corpses that I have paused to observe those minute characteristics of the body—now inanimate—which in some way reveal our organic nature, and how, after death, it continues to exist, showing us its decomposition.
Many times throughout our lives, we move through the world unaware of the flesh that constitutes us, of those small details that provide us with a better relationship with the outside world—our senses, and beyond them, the organs that make that connection possible. It is somewhat contradictory to say that we pause to notice them precisely in front of a lifeless body, but it is in that moment that we are struck and astonished by our own nature, and by how, in death, these pieces of flesh turn into wax and latex, and cease to feel.
Many people, during this process, asked why I chose to depict these features of the body through corpses. More than for the literal loss of sense—or of the senses—it is due to a long-standing obsession I have had with them, one that has given me new images of the flesh that accompanies us, and even the challenge of such extreme proximity to something that, for many—if not most—provokes disgust and fear: death.
It is precisely that lifeless flesh that unsettles and sharpens our senses, awakening in us perhaps the fear of losing them.
There is an antithesis in the encounter between loss and the exaltation of the senses: when taking these photographs, my eyes burned, my throat stung as I breathed, my hands sweated more than usual, and my nerves tangled with the pleasure of being before these swollen, plastinated bodies of the morgue—the frustration of not being able to touch them and the almost tactile manipulation through such close, almost intimate, proximity while photographing them.
The dead are the main component of my work. Their bodies produce more than a visual impact; they spark disquiet about life, the soul, what happens when we are no longer here, and the emptiness that remains—the absence of the object that exists today and vanishes tomorrow.
The loss of sense 2001 (serie 4)
Photography, canvas print.
100cm x 150cm each
“THE MORGUE IS A SECRET TEMPLE WHERE FEW ARE ALLOWED TO ENTER.” — Andrés Serrano