Bodyworlds exhibition

Carrying your own skin is possible

Today I have finally visited Bodyworlds, in Rome. An idea of Gunther von Hagen to display plastinated human bodies.

It took me some time. The first couple of attempts I made when the exhibition was in Belgium failed miserably when I was too impatient to stand in line for hours as long lines of waiting viewer snaked around the building where the plastinated bodies were on display.

This time it was easy. Few people and almost empy halls. A perfect afternoon to look at how we are made inside.

Many exhibits, and they change all the time in different cities. Plastinated men and women displayed in many everyday poses and performing normal activities that look altogether different in this context.

Couple mating

Playing cards

Football

Fascinating to find out that the total length of our blood vessels is some 96,000 km, more than twice the earth's circumference at the equator, and almost all of that is capillary veins and arteries which are much thinner than our hair.

As I walk out I am thinking it might me interesting to be plastinated, though I felt a bit queasy at the end, when a plastinated man was encouraging volunteers for his job from a wall board:

"I was like you are now: alive. You will be like I am now: dead."

Strongly recommended, the visit if not necessarily the volunteering. The exhibition tours the world, you will find its calendar here.