Cuerpo discapacitado y envidia prometeica en el arte

Resumo

While the human body is regarded as an obsolete item, it is even more belittled if it suffers from a disability. The abnormal body of a disabled person can become the subject of perverse marketing strategies whose intention is to intensify the “Promethean shame” that Günther Anders talks about, thus spurning consumerism. “Promethean shame” is the sense of inferiority that humans have when they are compared to the objects they make. We cannot look like a product manufactured in series. However, a disabled person can attach industrially manufactured prosthesis, thus being able to better adapt to the market’s demands. An incomplete body can become a display rack for exclusive objects made by prestigious brands, reminding other mortals of what they do not have. A good example is the Swarovski crystal-‐studded leg worn by singer Viktoria Modesta – a prosthesis that is part of the Alternative Limb Project by Sophie de Oliveira; or the glass legs designed by Mathew Barney for the paralympic athlete Amiee Mullins. Art, when put at the service of medicine and engineering, can open multiple possibilities to the disabled body – which can be fetishised, annulling the subversive power of its differences in our globalised era as our lives are getting increasingly technified. Finally, a video of my exhibition “Para qué quiero pies” [What Use Are Feet]2, which is about contingency as the seed of creation, about the injured body as an event in art. This personal project, apart from making disability visible and giving it value, stresses the importance of an educational change as regards the body and our perception of it, and of the need for spaces that enable reflexive thought, far from the noise and information overload with which the mass media overwhelm us.