Toxi, Zürich

S(k)ins, Toxi Verein, Zürich, Switzerland
From 18th of March to 26th of April 2022
Curated by Oz Oderbolz

In English, the expres­sion ​‘to get under one’s skin’ car­ries a puzz­ling poly­semy. It can be said of some­thing or someone that irri­tates – some­times until obses­sion – and, at the same time, it can also refer to the fact of gai­ning a dee­per unders­tan­ding of some­thing or, even, to manage to fill someone’s mind to the point of gai­ning control over them. In any case, it des­cribes a fee­ling that is all at once vis­ce­ral and overw­hel­ming. This is most notable when, like in Cole Porter’s song, the expres­sion is used in refe­rence to someone one is not able to for­get or ignore.1 There, love and pain become intrin­si­cally enme­shed, and the skin turns into the sym­bo­li­cal site of this emo­tio­nal entan­gle­ment.
With S(k)ins, Manon Wertenbroek tackles pre­ci­sely the inter­re­la­tion­ship bet­ween these two fee­lings. The exhibition’s title is bor­ro­wed from a text by Jay Prosser in which the scho­lar reflects on skin as a memory sur­face. In par­ti­cu­lar, Prosser’s essay uses psy­cho­ana­ly­sis to assert that our ​‘skin’s memory is bur­de­ned with the unconscious’.2 Discussing psy­cho­ana­lyst Didier Anzieu’s book The Skin Ego as well as a num­ber of what he calls ​‘skin auto­bio­gra­phies’, Prosser argues that trau­ma­tic (family) memo­ries, inclu­ding uncons­cious ones, can re-emerge, some­times gene­ra­tions later, in the form of a psy­cho­so­ma­tic skin condi­tion such as pso­ria­sis or eczema.3 There lies the consti­tu­tive connec­tion bet­ween ​‘sin’ and ​‘skin’, as high­ligh­ted by Manon Wertenbroek in the title of her exhi­bi­tion: the skin ​‘re- members’.4 We carry, not only under, but also on our skin, the traces of our emo­tio­nal life, and even our most guilty secrets and best repres­sed thoughts can sud­denly burst out in the form of a relent­less, itchy rash.
In her prac­tice, Manon Wertenbroek has been explo­ring the dua­lity of skin as some­thing that sin­gu­la­rises us and, at the same time, puts us in rela­tion to others, a contai­ning yet revea­ling organ – like a cur­tain pro­vi­ding pri­vacy while let­ting the light through. Whether sha­ping it directly as lea­ther or crea­ting works that evoke it more poe­ti­cally or meta­pho­ri­cally, she uses the image of skin as both a boun­dary and a point of contact, a fle­shy layer that simul­ta­neously pro­tects and connects, to reflect on the traces left by our expe­riences and inter­ac­tions. Though fle­shy, Manon Wertenbroek’s works are usually disem­bo­died: they are remi­nis­cent of bodies without taking a body’s shape or volume. For it is not so much the phy­si­cal being as it is the spi­ri­tual essence hid­den under the sur­face that she seeks to unco­ver. Entering this exhi­bi­tion, you may have had the fee­ling of cros­sing a thre­shold, of pene­tra­ting a dee­per layer, of going, in some way, under the skin. This immer­sive space within the space is an invi­ta­tion to scratch the sur­face, to peel off the cuta­neous layers and to reveal, per­haps, a concea­led emo­tio­nal truth. The walls of the room are wrap­ped in bru­shed cot­ton cove­red with salt stains, as if the fabric were pers­pi­ring. Out of this greyish mem­brane, enig­ma­tic objects emerge, both evo­ca­tive and sug­ges­ti­vely orga­nic, like memo­ries, night­mares and fan­ta­sies resur­fa­cing from the depths of the uncons­cious, cla­wing their way out of obli­vion and repres­sion. There, in the back, oppo­site the door through which you ente­red, a recess in the wall accom­mo­dates two items, hung there like pieces of clo­thing for­got­ten in a war­drobe or a hide ready to be tan­ned. Three open dra­wers pierce through the room’s walls. One contains a zip­per – a signa­ture ele­ment in Manon Wertenbroek’s works – that incites you to look behind the sur­face. Similarly, in a second dra­wer, a hatch is slightly ajar, hin­ting at a false bot­tom and truths dee­per than what may seem. The third one encloses a bizarre, fle­shy clump, mate­rially simi­lar to the objects han­ging in the niche and echoing the colour of the walls; an orga­nic pro­tu­be­rance already too swol­len for the dra­wer to be pushed in again. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard des­cri­bed a house’s fur­ni­ture and, in par­ti­cu­lar, its sto­rage units with their doors, shelves, double bot­toms, and locks, as ​‘veri­table organs of the secret psy­cho­lo­gi­cal life’.5 Chests and cabi­nets are neces­sary not only because they hold our belon­gings and help us orga­nise our mate­rial life, but also because they safe­guard our pri­vacy. Pulling a dra­wer open or pee­king inside a war­drobe also means pene­tra­ting someone’s inti­macy. It amounts to soun­ding the depths of a soul. In this room that is also a body, every object exudes double entendres, seems to conceal and reveal in equal mea­sure and to epi­to­mise a secret cham­ber that has begun to over­flow, to leak through the cracks and inter­stices in the walls. The dra­wers and alcove punc­tu­ring the wall’s sur­face sug­gest fur­ni­ture but they are also ori­fices gaping on our most repres­sed desires and trau­mas. Though inti­mate, this space is any­thing but cosy. The cushions, pro­mise of com­fort, are ren­de­red unu­sable, caked with latex and fused old rags. The room’s colours are not those of a heal­thy, rosy flesh but, rather, of a dete­rio­ra­ting skin, stai­ned with sweat and oozing fluids. It is a skin made sick by fears and secrets. Yet in its ill­ness, the space also conceals beauty and care, appa­rent in the meti­cu­lous­ness with which Manon Wertenbroek has exe­cu­ted her pieces, of which she often says that she simul­ta­neously scars and nur­ture them. In this room that is also a body, love and hatred are put face to face. There is pain, but there is also a pro­mise of care.
For the artist and femi­nist psy­cho­ana­lyst Bracha L. Ettinger, the aes­the­tic expe­rience entails a the­ra­peu­tic poten­tial. She consi­ders artists as hea­lers who desire ​‘to trans­form death, non­life, not-yet-life, and no-more-life into art’.6 For S(k)ins, Manon Wertenbroek crea­ted a space in which death drive and life force, decay and ero­ti­cism go hand in hand. It is an exhi­bi­tion that conveys us to an expe­rience that is simul­ta­neously uncanny and ges­ta­tio­nal, in which fears and pain begin to sur­face to be confron­ted rather than remai­ning buried and infec­tious. While sick, the body is still dis­played here as a home to inha­bit. And inha­bi­ting one’s own body, embo­dying it, also means making it com­for­table, homely, des­pite the mess that some­times overw­helms it, spilling out of its dra­wers and cabi­nets. We are never as aware of our body as when we expe­rience pain, when it sud­denly doesn’t feel like it should. It is in these moments of alie­na­tion when our own body becomes estran­ged from the idea or image we have of it, that we start to ack­now­ledge it, to be ​‘in touch’ with our own self. Out of alie­na­tion emerges a pos­si­bi­lity for connec­tion, and for hea­ling.

References:
1 Cole Porter, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, 1936.
2 Jay Prosser, ​‘Skin Memories’, in S. Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds.), Thinking Through the Skin, Routledge,
2001, p. 52.
3 See Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, trans. Naomi Segal, Routledge, 2016.
4 Prosser, p. 52.
5 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1994, p. 78.
6 Bracha L. ERnger, ​‘Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event’, in The Matrixial
Borderspace, The University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 197. Thanks to Nicole Schweizer for poin­ting out this refe­rence.

Text by Simon Würsten Marin
Photo cre­dits: © Flavio Karrer