Monstruos y fragmentos en la representación de un cuerpo actual

Abstract

When Mary Shelley begets life from joined fragments of dead organic matter inher novel Frankenstein, she is not only begetting life to the monster itself, she is also begetting the inaugural myth of the modern monster. Monsters are those beings that arouse admiration and terror, and have been classified as prodigies and abominations that attract gawkers. In one way or another, in one era or another, the human species cannot remain impassive in the face of its monsters. Faced with a body that crosses the frontiers of "normality", we establish a series of explanations and justifications that swing between reality, fantasy and estrangement. A faithful reflection of this has been the cinema throughout the 20th century, such as the classics of horror films. In certain contemporary monsters we lack these references, their states remain in transformation and metamorphosis. Perhaps the monsters most in keeping with today's society, in constant metamorphosis, are characterised by the unstable, the random, the irregular, and fundamentally, by the fragmentary. The fragmentary is thus applied to the rhetoric of the body and its artistic expressions. Fragmentation of the body is an artistic resource that has been intensely promoted in the last half of the 20th century, and in an absolute way in the 21st century, with a great variety of resources, different levels of intensity and different degrees of subtlety. Whether physically, psychologically or symbolically. In this rhetoric of the body, fragmentation can allude to the totality of the body, but the fragment can acquire a forceful autonomy on its own...