Koerperwelten
Yes, those are real human skulls behind me. They once held real mouths with real tongues that could taste and taunt and maybe there were green eyes or brown eyes or steele blue eyes in those sockets and behind it all each one of those skulls protected a human brain that once elicited emotions and thoughts and dreams and desires and at no point in the afternoon did I consider any of these possibilities: I was too drawn in to the anatomical wonder of the human body and the process of plastinazation that was going on around me.
Jeff and I made one last adventure before my time was up in Berlin. We headed to the Plastinarium: a factory known for mumifying corpses into plastic pieces of scientific art. As gruesome as it sounds, at no time was it ever portrayed in a frightful manner; and this coming from a particularly squimish person in regards to situations such as these. Only the faint wafting of ether reminded me of the life-and-death solemnity of the room.
A body had just been brought in and a team of three women were hard at work removing the skin and outer layers of fat. Their work was in the public domain and I stood their wide-eyed, jaw-dropped as they carefully picked away while rehashing whatever gossip it was that was hot at the moment. “Do you have any questions?”, they asked me, still hunched over the corpse. I stuttered, stammered out an “is it hard?” and again stood in wide-eyed amazement as they calmly explained their jobs.
Jeff and I continued through the factory into the exhibition hall. The anatomical sciences of the body were circled with a more artistic flair here. Sculpted masses engaged each other in card games, rode bikes and exposed the dirty truth of a smoker’s lung. Fascination again filled the senses. At one point I found myself standing face-to-face with a figure who was set in the exact same stance I was in at the given minute. I stood there amazed, seemingly peering into my own body — the heart, the sinews in the arms, the tiny hole in the bladder. It’s all I could think about the following afternoon. “What a piece of work is man!”