PROJECT 1.3
2022
Metamorphosis of the Skin
This was a project I loved, created during university in collaboration with my classmate Clara Ferroni for our Material Landscape class (Paisaje Material).
Through the use of biomaterials, we shaped a skin of shifting textures and forms—a living mantle that embodies the passage of time upon the human body.
Each layer speaks in its own language of colors, reliefs, and surfaces, honoring the skin as both witness and storyteller. It carries our experiences, linking inner and outer worlds, a fragile yet resilient frontier where life inscribes itself through marks, scars, and traces of memory.
This skin becomes more than matter; it becomes a map of individuality, a landscape of all that makes us human.
This mantle speaks of time traced upon the skin—skins in transition, shifting, transforming. Through layers of materials, textures, colors, and reliefs, we sought to honor the human skin in all its universality and imperfection, to give value to what is often overlooked.
Our skin is the evidence of all we have lived. It carries memories, embraces scars, and registers the passing of days. Across differences, there is a quiet kinship: we all share the same fragile frontier, shaped in distinct ways by our experiences, weathered by what life has brought to us.
With each surface—thick or thin, smooth or rough—we explored how skin shelters us from the outer world while revealing our inner lives. It draws a boundary between inside and out, yet also invites connection, sensing, and belonging.
We found ourselves asking: Do we inhabit our skin, or does it inhabit us?
Skin contains us, defines us, marks us. It bears the weight of memories, the trace of gestures, the imprint of love and loss. Every wrinkle, scar, freckle, and scratch tells a story. It makes us unrepeatable, yet binds us in our shared humanity.
Here, skin becomes a living archive—a space for memory, for individuality, for the unspoken language of life etched on its surface.
SENSORY PERCEPTION
Two main senses guide the encounter with the mantle: sight and touch.
Sight reveals the landscape first—its colors, reliefs, folds, and perforations. Through vision, the many variations of its surface become visible, like a map of textures waiting to be explored.
Then comes touch. By tracing the material with the hands, new sensations emerge—softness, tension, bubbles, rigid zones, unexpected smoothness—details the eye could not fully capture. The body learns what vision alone cannot tell.
Sound, though unintended, inevitably enters the experience. Each gesture, each movement across the surface, brings faint crackles, murmurs, or whispers, echoes of the materials themselves responding to contact.
Scent, too, becomes part of the work almost by accident: the gelatin used in its making carries a subtle, persistent odor, unplanned yet inseparable from the whole.
Only taste remains absent—a sense deliberately left behind, so the focus stays on seeing, touching, and inhabiting the work through the body’s other thresholds.
Sight reveals the landscape first—its colors, reliefs, folds, and perforations. Through vision, the many variations of its surface become visible, like a map of textures waiting to be explored.
Then comes touch. By tracing the material with the hands, new sensations emerge—softness, tension, bubbles, rigid zones, unexpected smoothness—details the eye could not fully capture. The body learns what vision alone cannot tell.
Sound, though unintended, inevitably enters the experience. Each gesture, each movement across the surface, brings faint crackles, murmurs, or whispers, echoes of the materials themselves responding to contact.
Scent, too, becomes part of the work almost by accident: the gelatin used in its making carries a subtle, persistent odor, unplanned yet inseparable from the whole.
Only taste remains absent—a sense deliberately left behind, so the focus stays on seeing, touching, and inhabiting the work through the body’s other thresholds.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
Length: 165 cm
Maximum width: 68 cm
Minimum width: 38 cm
Minimum thickness: 1 mm
Average thickness: 1.5 mm
Maximum thickness: 3 mm
Weight: 1 kg
Colors: The material consists of a transparent skin with varying levels of opacity. In certain areas, it takes on a subtle yellowish hue.
Transparency: 90%
Opacity: 10%
Relief: 25%
Flexibility: The mantle is primarily soft and flexible, allowing it to be shaped and moved as desired. However, this varies depending on the area, material type, and thickness. Agar Agar remains softer, while gelatin develops a slightly firmer, less malleable consistency.
The project culminated in a final exhibition where the biomaterial, a moving image, and a fragment of poetry converge—shaping an atmosphere that invites the audience to step beyond the ordinary and enter another space entirely.
I meet my skin
and see it for the very first time.
I thank it for its shelter,
for being my first bridge to the outside world.
Its purity lights my days,
a quiet companion as we grow together—
fragile, yet learning.
We learn to feel,
to touch,
to change.
I learn to care for it,
for it is my armor.
I protect it from the world,
and it hides me within itself.
Together we discover vulnerability,
diversity,
and intimacy
in the presence of others.
It connects my inner life to the outer one,
leaving marks and scars
as proof that I am alive.
It faces the world
while carrying me inside it.
It will stay with me until my last moment,
and then I will leave it behind
at the final meeting.
and see it for the very first time.
I thank it for its shelter,
for being my first bridge to the outside world.
Its purity lights my days,
a quiet companion as we grow together—
fragile, yet learning.
We learn to feel,
to touch,
to change.
I learn to care for it,
for it is my armor.
I protect it from the world,
and it hides me within itself.
Together we discover vulnerability,
diversity,
and intimacy
in the presence of others.
It connects my inner life to the outer one,
leaving marks and scars
as proof that I am alive.
It faces the world
while carrying me inside it.
It will stay with me until my last moment,
and then I will leave it behind
at the final meeting.