his paper begins with the skin which forms on top of milk. It’s a skin which, as Julia Kristeva argues, conjures horror as it crumples and folds, wet, against our lips. But it’s also a curiosity. It’s a skin which skims and re-surfaces the liquid beneath. Tempting us to poke at it. This paper is primarily concerned with three things: the skin, surfacing, and eating skin. It’s interested in the properties of skin, foam for example, and in frying and in frost. It explores practices of eating and imagining thehuman skin in selected live artworks including Anna Królikiewicz’s FLESH FLAVOUR FROST (2011) and Arthur Berzinsh’s Eschatology (2018). Ultimately, it seeks to re-read these works – specifically the moment at which skin passes the lips – as expressions of love, desire, and connection. In so doing, I propose that such figurations of eating the skin matter because they trouble the relationship between the skin and surface, as well as signalling our enmeshment in wider social and cultural assemblages. In “Eating Skin” Elspeth Probyn draws threads between Derrida and hooks’ thinking to ask how we might eat skin well. The metaphor, here, of eating the skin theorises the ways in which we have, and might, approach and relate to the‘other.’ This paper shifts these questions to ask how representations of eating skin might re-form our understandings of skin as social surface, and how this might be understood to gesture, more broadly, towards the stickiness of love. This paper seeks therefore to build on Samantha Frost’s work which offers a new theory of the human as a biocultural creature in response to questions such as: “How should we live as humans?” and “What do we owe to ourselves and others?” I suggest how figurations of the skin, and eating skin, can be read as attendant to such questions. More specifically, I ask how eating skin intervenes in questions such as: “How and what do we love?” and “Might we love and live differently?” In short, I begin to re-skin Frost’s theory – offering the biocultural creature a new surface – as I contemplate the ways in which artworks make legible the skin’s operations as a biocultural substance.  

Freya Verlander works at the University of Warwick. Recent publications include an article in Performance Research which explores the role of touch in our lives with reference to c-tactile afferents. Her research interests are, broadly, in exploring theinterfaces between science, the senses, and different modes of performance.