The Social Construction of the Body in Contemporary Culture Joan Morey in the MACBA Collection

Conceived as a performance for the screen, SOCIAL BODY. Anatomy Lesson examines the social construction of the body in contemporary culture. The project is linked to the anatomy lesson, a commonplace subject in Baroque painting that pictorially reflected the new paradigm of empirical aknowledge of modern rationalism. Morey locates his anatomy lesson in the anatomical amphitheatre of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia, built in 1762 and one of the best preserved in Europe. In the seventeenth century, dissection anatomy classes were infrequent and spectacular, to the point of becoming social events. Morey shows the body of a man in an amphitheatre surrounded by a group of characters examining him. As the work progresses, excerpts from the essay by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) and from Cine-Eye manifesto and other writings from the 1920s by Dziga Vertov are heard. The artist draws a parallel between the physical and tangible body of the individual and the social body as the set of individuals manipulated, observed, dissected and objectified by the mechanisms of power.