Skin Hunger: a sensory experience because humans need to be touched
The effects of tactile stimulation on the structure of the brain can be appreciated by understanding that the skin is almost an extension of the brain, formed as it is from the same layer of tissue during the embryonic stage of life. - Taylor, 1979
Everything we think, do, or not do, happens thanks to our brain. The structure of this brilliant machine determines our possibilities, our boundaries and our behaviour. We are our brain. Nowadays, exploring the brain is not only investigating mental diseases, but is also an attempt to try to understand why we are the way we are, why we do what we do, and why we try to understand who we are.
Our brain is inextricably part of our body, which in return is a lively sensory system that interacts with the world to produce a personalized habitat; the body is the platform that produces experiences.
Artist Sissel Tolaas in one of her speeches says that we, as humans, have something for free from our life: our body. She called the body ‘the hardware’, and she renamed the senses the ‘software’. We can activate these amazing ‘software’ that are in our ‘hardware’. We can touch, embrace, perceive, listen and behold with our entire body. Our body becomes the center of everything and the house of our memories and identity.
In my practice, I believe that all human senses, including vision, are the extension of the sense of touch. Skin is the membrane that is constantly in contact with the world. Skin is our border, protection, and ultimate limit before we get in contact with what surrounds us. It is our medium of communication. This membrane is the oldest and most sensitive of our organs. Even the cornea of our eyes is protected by a transparent layer of modified skin.
Skin allows our body to touch, skin covers our ears and eyes and nose and mouth. It is my view, that ‘touch’ therefore, is the predecessor of all the other senses. That’s why it is always a wonder when an artwork is able, ‘to make visible how the world touches us,’ as Merleau-Ponty said of the paintings of Cézanne.
“The importance of the skin is that it is literally the initial point of contact between the external and internal environments,” wrote Ossama T. Osman in his paper The skin as a mode of communication in Expert Review of Dermatology. “Embryologically, both the skin and the brain are developed from the same ectoderm germ layer, a fact that invites many thought-provoking connotations. Psychoanalytically, the skin has a fundamental role to play in the development of consistent and positive communication between mother and child.”
I am not a scientist, I am not a neurologist and I am not a sociologist.
I am someone who is more interested in the human being rather than in the objects that surround us. Or, even better, I am intrigued by how objects and materials are in relation to our bodies, and how these relations create a secondary effect on our behavior, the human behavior.
The stronger focus of my practice is tactility and how to convey ideas, interact with human behavior and emotions through the sense of touch. And certainly, this last period of 2020 gave me a lot to think and research due to the sudden lack of human interaction and, therefore, tactility.
Showing the textures in the prop. Photo by Anisa Xhomaqi
It is thrilling, in such times, to be able to create a whole work around the human body and around the skin!
In one square inch of human skin, we can find 19 million cells, 625 sweat glands, 90 oil glands, 65 hairs, 19 feet of blood vessels, and 19,000 sensory cells! The human skin is considered the largest organ in the body (about 16% of your body weight). As mentioned earlier, the skin has many different protective and metabolic functions that help keep your body stabilized but is also the organ that, through touch, makes you remember, brings back memories, as much as creating new ones.
But what happens if we can’t touch each other?
The answer is ‘skin hunger’ which is the biological need for human touch. It’s why babies in neonatal intensive care units are placed on their parent’s naked chests. It’s the reason that prisoners in solitary confinement often report craving human contact as ferociously as they desire their liberty. Humans need to be touched. At least, they do in order to function well.
Communication image for Skin Hunger. Photo by Willem Welthoven
“When you touch the skin,” explains Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami, “it stimulates pressure sensors under the skin that send messages to the vagus [a nerve in the brain.] As vagal activity increases, the nervous system slows down, heart rate and blood pressure decrease, and your brain waves show relaxation. Levels of stress hormones such as cortisol are also decreased.” Touch also releases oxytocin, the hormone released during sex and childbirth to bond us together. In other words, the human touch is biologically good for you.
Therefore, together with chef/artist Alice Heron, we decided to design an experience to feed craving bodies and create a sensorial breakfast that could fulfill the lack of tactility of our current times. Through researching materials, gestures, movements, ingredients and interviewing several professionals working in the perfume, body treatment and culinary fields, we designed a set of props along with a menu to bring all these aspects together in a 45 minutes tactile sensorial treatment.
Feeding participant of Skin Hunger. Photo by Anisa Xhomaqi
The designed props are helping to place the guest in specific positions (for example a saddle-like seat) or touch their body without using our hands (a napkin encrusted with massage balls).
Props used during Skin Hunger. Photo by Anisa Xhomaqi
Following, the food is primarily inspired by the fact that the guests are being fed by performers, meaning that they are bite-sized. The dishes were also developed along with the props, they reference their shapes and are emphasizing the sensorial state we aim to create through the tactile gestures.
Placing something on the body gives a sense of becoming one with the skin or inner body and elicits a different sense of touch, comfort/discomfort and an aesthetic presentation of yourself.
Our goal was to bring our guests into a state of surrender and trust and, starting from there, have them experience several sensations. From temporarily numbing their mouth or carefully feeding them icy dishes, to conveying their energy and releasing stress by performing simple tactile movements and working on their breathing.
“For the first half of the breakfast experience, the participants are blind-folded. The inability to see, forces participants to activate their other senses. In comparison, this experience is like a spoon-fed child: they learn about new tastes, but are unaware of what is in their mouths. In addition, the use of touch reminds us of the value of human interactions. The act of eating is no longer mechanical and rushed. Instead, their breakfast creates a meditative and thoughtful space. It is an exercise of relaxation, and to acknowledge your body’s reactions while eating. Both food and the act of touch compliment and mimic each other — whether it is cutlery made of bread, or a string of tomatoes representing the human posture.” writes Naomi Tidball after experiencing Skin Hunger.
Rubbing ice on the lips of Skin Hunger participant. Photo by Anisa Xhomaqi
Skin Hunger lasted for an entire week and about 240 guests attended.We are still researching its results as, because sensorial effects are so personal, the reactions were quite different: some people left in anger in the middle of the performance, some people cried as they have not been touched for months, some people fainted without knowing why and some were indifferent. This is the reason why I believe that, even after about 300 thousand years of human interaction, new discoveries and unexpected results can still be explored in this field. Not only from an artistic point of view but by bringing together neurologists, scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, immunologists…
If you are interested in knowing more about Skin Hunger, please head to Mediamatic’s website, where the project took place.
Sources and inspirations for the article:
[1] Online lecture of Sissel Tolaas. Sissel Tolaas/on smell. Youtube (2014)
[2] The skin as a mode of communication by Ossama T Osman on Expert Review of Dermatology, 5:5, 493-496, DOI: 10.1586/edm.10.46 (2010)
[3] The eyes of the skin by Juhani Pallasmaa (1996)
[4] The man who mistook his wife for a cap by Oliver Sacks (1985)
[5] 6: ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLE IUP Journal of English Studies, Body Language: An Effective Communication Tool by Patel, Dipika S.
[6] The feeling of things by Adam Caruso (2008)
[7] The Tell-Tale Brain (or The man who thought he was dead and other stories) by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (2011)
[8] The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture by Juhani Pallasmaa (2009)
[9] Textures that we like to touch: An experimental study of aesthetic preferences for tactile stimuli article by Roberta Etzi, Charles Spence, Alberto Gallace (2014)
[10] We are our brain by Dick Swaab (2015)
[11] Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
[12] The brain senses touch beyond the body by Richard Sima, 2019