gegen perfection

I imagine your worn body close to me, your wrinkly skin, your flabby hips, your spotty face, your greasy hair, your smelly armpits, your quirky personality, your loud laugh, your dirty fingernails, your smell of everything that scares the hell out of everyone. But not me.

The idea of the perfect body is a social fairy tale. It's the disciplining of human anatomy so that it always works and doesn't get sick. Anatomo-politics is “used to take control over bodies … to increase their productive force through exercise, drill, and so on” (Foucault). A control that seeks to govern bodies and normalize a standard of beauty, productivity, and desirability. We constantly move within a digital panopticon where we police ourselves and each other, reinforcing able-bodied heteronormative aesthetic standards through algorithms, likes, and face-filter fictions. But like gender, the body is not a fixed entity. It is complex, fluid, changeable, and surprisingly comical.

By resisting the myth of the perfect appearance, we challenge systems of oppression that profit from our insecurities. Bodies can be sites of resistance, of defiance against the capitalist gaze that seeks to calm us down by making us busy with the suffering of imperfection.

Let GEGEN be your stage to prove that you can be perfect by showing our discordant selves and hot messiness.

concept courtesy of Mirko Winkel
photo courtesy of Florian Hetz
graphics & logo by Enrico Bardin