Agata Wieczorek

The photo series Beauty Makers and Fetish of the Image, which portray the producers and consumers of silicon female body masks, explores how increased globalization and interconnectivity does not necessarily lead to equal access and visibility.The two sets of photos are markedly different, both aesthetically and in the way they position their subjects. In Wieczorek’s photos of the Roanyer factory in Xuzhou, China, she depicts a predominately female workforce as they produce costly skin suits for an overwhelmingly male-identifying clientele. The employees do not look at the camera and are instead immersed in their daily tasks: trimming, sewing, airbrushing, and compiling the suits. The images of the maskers are, in contrast, highly performative and carefully posed.

Unlike the factory workers, they stare directly into the lens of the camera, demanding the viewer’s gaze. Although the maskers rarely wear their suits in public, many of them enjoy producing and sharing images of themselves dressed in them. Posts on the Female Masking are almost exclusively photographs, which other users upvote and comment on. However, like most fetishes, dressing in silicon skin suits is still widely considered taboo. The community of enthusiasts is thus pushed out of sight, to the privacy of their homes or online safe spaces. Although the maskers’ desires are socially marginalised, economically they are seen as a source of revenue and thus a market has emerged specifically to fulfil them.

Reflecting on the relationship between neoliberalism and gay identity, Ann Pellegrini wonders: “Might these consuming subjects also queer capitalism?” But what does queering capitalism mean when expensive commodities are produced by an unseen “Third World” workforce and purchased by comparatively privileged Western consumers? Marina Gržinić argues that “global capitalism functions not with division but with entanglement,” implicating and involving everything and everyone. According to her, this actively “conceals the global post-Fordist division of labour, which can be best described as an international division of racialised labour between the first, second, and third worlds.” As the margins are increasingly blurred, marginalization becomes harder to qualify and protest. Difference is adopted a marketing strategy, and queer desires are swiftly commoditised.

After all, what connects the people in these two sets of images other than the commodities exchanged between them? In photos of the factory workers, the women handle the suits with care, but indifference. For the maskers, however, they are sources of empowerment, the means through which they enter and literally embody the “other.” But as the majority of maskers identify as heterosexual men in their daily lives, they do not have to experience the real consequences that come with living as a woman, including lower wages, limited opportunities, and gender-based violence. The human “other”—the flesh-and-blood woman producing the suits—remains distant and unknown.

Lexington Davis

Fetish of the Image, the first part of a project with the same title, explores the subject of non-binary gender identity. With a documentary approach, the photographs and videos bring us the Masking subculture – a prevalent and hermetic, yet surprisingly popular, worldwide fetish community.

Masking is mainly practiced by heterosexual men and employs r1ealistic silicone costumes imitating the female body. Although the idea of entering into someone else’s skin may seem merely an erotic, uncanny extravaganza, Masking is rooted in an ideology far from entertainment. In fact,  Masking is based on the idea that each human identity consists of two genders instead of only one and understands identity as a matter of individual choice, instead of a bestowed or imposed quality.

As a consequence, the community has been attracting people who argue against the widespread and deeply rooted socio-political conventions regarding gender binary identity and body understanding. A Mask is not only a mere fetish, but a manifest of non-binaryness and a symbol of individual’s freedom.

For those who were weaned on Bulgakov’s disagreement with the oxymoron “second freshness”, the idea of “second skin” may be as unsettling as the concept of “post-truth”.

Not only the identity and gender are perceived by the Maskers as changeable and multiple, but so is the body. It is not valued because of its uniqueness or naturalness – its role is closer to prosthesis that can be easily changed and replaced with better and more durable artificial parts.

Yet, much like the Greek idea of kalokagathia, appearance is only half of the ideal – without physical experience, the transformation is incomplete. Second skin is tight and non-breathable. It provides an intense physical sensation as it adheres to the real body and re-shapes it, changes its centre of gravity and forces one to move differently. It doesn’t only change the appearance, but also simulates the physical experience of being someone else. Although Masking is rooted in the concept of realistic simulation and embodiment of the feminine “second nature”, the reconstruction of the female image often fails to follow the common notion of female beauty. The bodily disguised characters seem rather an uncanny result of queered consumption; despite the Masking community being a socially marginalised niche, their desires can be fulfilled in a legal market created to address this new profitable field. What is taken by the community as an ideological symbol, is also a financially calculated commodity.

The series documents the Masking practice in Hong Kong, China and across Europe.

Agata Wieczorek

Skin is an ambiguous construct. It is the external cover of the body, it’s a soft and firm protection, as well as it’s a visual representation. Yet, as it wraps the body tightly, it cannot be taken or changed. Moreover, skin not only represents the body but also dooms it to the particular look. It is skin that signalises individual’s identity which criteria – gender, race, age – are frequently employed as fixed definitions that are imposed in order to structure political, economic and social orders.

The photographic series combines of self-portraits in disguise. The realistic, silicone costumes imitating female face and body are broadly used by Female Masking fetish and crossdressing subculture that has become a direct inspiration for the series.

But as the majority of Maskers identify as men in their daily lives, they do not confront the real consequences of being a woman, such as gender-based discrimination and violence.

The idea of “second skin” is thus dubious and symbolic. On one hand, it provides a tool for embodying an alter-ego and expressing individual’s freedom of choice of their identity – and as such it is employed by the Masking community. On the other hand, the act of wearing the female mask by a woman puts the disguise into a far different context as it becomes an uncanny and claustrophobic costume that emphasises these imposed qualities – the criteria that signalises oppression, discrimination and control.

Agata Wieczorek

Medical simulation is an increasingly popular practice that aims at eliminating the actual bodies from medical practical learning and transforming it into the repetitive, uniformed training procedure. Simulations are normally based on role-play and involve high-tech realistic dummies and body-parts props.
Here, the learning process aligns with the contemporary tendency in education and research that increasingly draw knowledge not from reality-based empirical experience, but from a model of the real.
Production of the high-tech devices has been developing in the recent years as medical simulations demand progressively more accurate, advanced and realistic imitations of human body.

In the era of advanced technology and when human body has become central to economic growth due to the dynamic technological development, virtualization of science may be identified on economic anthropology level. Yuval Noah Harari notices, “the modern economy needs constant and indefinite growth to survive. (…) An economy built on everlasting growth needs endless projects—just like the quests for immortality, bliss and divinity”.
The quest for resisting death creates a constant demand for advanced solutions and enables capitalist economy to establish science a new field of endless production while driving the medical research and high-tech production on the brink of sci-fiction.
Medical simulations draw the intersection between medicine and high-tech, and illustrate the intention to erase carnality and death. The utopian dimension of these needs resonates in the uncanny, trans-human artefacts and within the hermetic, artificial spaces where confusion between reality and fiction, empirical experiment and virtual simulation operates.

Agata Wieczorek (Poland, 1992) is based in Lodz and is currently completing her master’s degree in Direction of Photography at the National Film School. She previously graduated with honours from the Strzeminski Art Academy in Lodz, where she studied graphic arts and painting. Wieczorek’s practice combines film, photography, and animation. Often, she deals with hermetic environments and socially marginalized groups in order to explore uncommon understandings of identity, self, and gender. Her work has been exhibited and awarded internationally, including at Obscura Festival of Photography, Malaysia, Warsaw Photo Days (Grand Prix), Poland; Kaunas Photography Festival (award nominee), Croatia; Getxophoto (finalist), Spain; and Finnish Museum of Photography, among others. She’s also a writer and contributor for Lynx Contemporary.