Links, curiosities & mixed wonders – 2

Jun2

Tomorrow I will be at Winchester University to take part in a three-day interdisciplinary conference focusing on Death, art and anatomy. My talk will focus on memento mori in relation to the Capuchin Crypt in Rome — which, together with other Italian religious ossuaries, I explored in my Mors Pretiosa.
Waiting to tell you more about the event, and about the following days I will spend in London, I leave you with some curiosities to savour.

SynDaver Labs, which already created a synthetic cadaver for autopsies (I wrote about it in this post), is developing a canine version for veterinary surgery training. This puppy, like his human analogue, can breathe, bleed and even die.

Even if it turned out to be fake, this would still be one of the tastiest news in recent times: in Sculcoates, East Yorks, some ghost hunters were visiting a Nineteenth century cemetery when they suddenly heard some strange, eerie moanings. Ghost monks roaming through the graves? A demonic presence haunting this sacred place? None of the above. In the graveyard someone was secretely shooting a porno.

Speaking of unusual places to make love, why not inside a whale? It happened in the 1930s at Gotheburg Museum of Natural History, hosting the only completely taxidermied blue whale inside of which a lounge was built, equipped with benches and carpets. After a couple was caught having sex in there, the cetacean was unfortunately closed to the public.

In case you’ve missed it, there was also a man who turned a whale’s carcass into a theatre.

The borders of medieval manuscripts sometimes feature rabbits engaged in unlikely battles and different cruelties. Why? According to this article, it was basically a satire.

If you think warmongering rabbits are bizarre, wait until you see cats with jetpacks on their backs, depicted in some Sixteenth century miniatures. Here is a National Geographic article about them.

One last iconographic enigma. What was the meaning of the strange Sixteenth century engravings showing a satyr fathoming a woman’s private parts with a plumb line? An in-depth and quite beautiful study (sorry, Italian only) unveils the mystery.

Did the terrible “Blood Eagle” torture really exist? Some historians doubt it.

Adventurous lives: Violet Constance Jessop was an ocean liner stewardess who in 1911 survived the Olympia ship incident. Then in 1912 she survived the sinking of the Titanic. And in 1916 the sinking of the Britannic.

In China, some barbers still practice the ancient art of eye-cleansing… with a razor.

Here is my piece about Johnny Eck, the Half-Boy, on the new issue of Illustrati dedicated to vices and virtues.

Lastly, there is a Wiki page devoted to the most unusual deaths in history.

Little Lost People

Sep29

What was the last time you actually paid attention to the sidewalk?
Can the microcosm around our feet still hold some unexpected visions?
Does it still mean something to focus on small things and details, and to look down – beside avoiding stepping on something unpleasant?

In a world where we are taught that everything, from skyscrapers to our own ambitions, should aim high, artists Slinkachu and Cordal – each their own way, each of them with a different and personal approach – seem to want to value all that is small, forgotten, invisible.
The works of these two street artists, who are both active, independently from one another, on the London scene, could be confused at a first glance: they both utilize tiny figurines, and install their provocative miniature sculptures inside the urban context, leaving them to their fate. But the similarities really stop there.

Slinkachu has an unmistakable satirical and sardonic vein, so much so that his installations are presented as snarky micro-stories; Slinkachu mini-men are mirrors, spoofs debunking our miseries, excesses and vanities. How intelligent, how civilized they must think they are – yet dimensions contradict their actions. Whether they believe they are criminals or superheroes, these microscopic little primates aren’t going anywhere.

Their misadventures are evidently similar to ours, and the figurines sometimes even represent a pop and bizarre version of some of the most debated themes in the news.

Cordal’s little men, on the other hand, are the nightmare of removal coming back to the surface.
The atmosphere here is apocalyptic, melancholic, surreal, and in his works the miniature cannot be separated from the (often hopeless) landscape in which it has been positioned.
There is something touching and strangely eerie in this anonymous people emerging from the puddles in our cities, or sinking back into them “following the leaders”; there is a Beckett quality to these sad ghosts haunting our drainpipes, to these lost tourists, to these victims of the cruelty of a much too large and heavy world, and to their tiny bodies disappearing in the surrounding filth.

What haunts us, in these figurines, is the fact we recognize them all too well. We can identify, and yet we cannot shake the embarassement of a vague guilt. The world is, after all, custom-made to be our size, not theirs.
The poor, the troubled, the outsiders inhabit realities that are too small, they live on a scale which is too distant for us to realize that we are stepping on them. Still, it would suffice to watch.