SOLIDI TRONCHI
A SURVEY OF TODAY’S PROSTHETICS
Master Degree thesis
As a designer, I have always been interested to body modification in terms of what happens when a body is slightly different from what society considers as normal. It is nearly three millennia since man has made the first prosthesis, and yet when that word is being used, usually the first reaction is a set of emotions like “feeling sorry” for the amputated person and some kind of repulsion towards the orthopedic implants.
That is why I asked myself: What would you do if you were given the opportunity to redesign a part of your body? I have deliberately used the terms opportunity and redesign because that’s the approach I wanted to give to my work: disability not as a disadvantage, but as a challenge. So I tried to create a new image of the future human body and started to investigate where the industrial world would have gone to find the diametrically opposed solution to an aesthetic that tends to imitate nature and so human body (like nowadays prosthetics design does). What I found are rational worlds, universes of the absolute, Platonic solids and minimalist aesthetics.
I manipulated six images in which human body and architecture got together and merged, creating a sort of idealistic fusion that led to a unique hybrid-being, in which body parts are replaced by geometrical architectures, installations or solids. The installations and architectures that I used are East West/West East by Richard Serra, the National Congress of Brasilia by Oscar Niemeyer, Monuments by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond and the Red Fluo bridge on river Elliðaár by Teiknistofan Tröð.
