Videoperformance
The proposal for "skins" wants to emphasize this great cutaneous organ as the place, the means and the end where we collect all kinds of information that surrounds us, providing us with the necessary dose of tactile contact for each one of us. This dose is personal and non-transferable. The need for contact between people is determined by indefinite factors developed throughout our lives.
The skin as an organ that defines us, characterizes us, identifies us, at the same time that it separates us from the rest, isolates us, delimits us, but through which we communicate with the environment. The area of the skin contains an infinite number of nerve endings that give us information from the outside of our body, such as temperature, pressure, pain, tactile sensitivity (such as identifying different textures, shapes, materials...)... in short, sensations that we organize in our memory. The “skins” project approaches the skin organ itself. The skin, that velvety coat of cells and proteins that keeps the rest of the world in and out. It is our armor, our radiator, our entrance for pain and pleasure. It is the largest organ in the body. Soft and silky to the eye and to the touch. We lose 600,000 skin particles an hour, half a kilo a year. The skin covers more than 2 m₂, weighs 3 kg and we are constantly creating new skin.
In the times we are living in, contact between people has been limited, the Post-Pandemic era, our ever-present social networks, teleworking and the computer as a work tool have forced us into that corporeal isolation. Thanks to tactile sensitivity we can achieve sensations of pleasure and we cannot forget that it is necessary to maintain a healthy emotional richness. The social distance that we live in today isolates many people who live alone in their homes from their emotions.
Did you know that if we don't have physical contact our body secretes a hormone called cortisol? In our body, when there is a high level of cortisol, it triggers depression, therefore, if there is no physical contact, depression is triggered. If we have physical contact, blood cortisol levels drop and the probability of developing depression decreases. This reaction in our organism is surely due to the fact that human beings consider ourselves gregarious beings, beings that are organized like mammalian animals to live in community and in a group, there is a group need to maintain group stability and individual mental stability to maintain the strength of the group. All these studies have come to light as a result of the confinement, since a large-scale global physical confinement had not previously been experienced. This is one of the consequences of not having physical contact.
