Le Corps Vécu

We all know the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night… with a lack of sense in one of our limbs. Carefully you try to lift your arm up, to put it in another position. If you’re lucky within some seconds your arm stars to tingle and slowly the feeling returns. Sometimes it takes a minute longer and you can’t ignore a moment of fear. Thinking: will the feeling ever come back… In the modern society we often want to forget that ‘the physical’ is also a source of information. Because of rationalization, we turned away from our ‘ordinary’ world, convinced that our senses do not teach us anything valuable. Only the objective is worth holding on to. But we cannot ignore our body and look at it as a “lifeless bag of cells”. We don’t just have a body, we ARE a body. Forgetting this gives us a feeling of a ‘sleeping arm’. In this condition your limb is biologically still yours, but you do not experience it as yours. It seems the arm of a stranger… ‘The alienation of our body’ is the theme of my work. By making images that are very sensitive, tactile and physical, I hope to renew the viewer, if even for a moment, with a sense of physicality…. —Marlous van der Sloot