02 Second Skin
03 Bearded Virgin
04 Insect Collection
05 Dialogue
07 Borderlne
08 Reformatory
09 Bodyspace
10 Dialectics of the Surface
12 Pyromania
13 Anti-dualistic Dualism
14 Neon-forest
15 various works
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A trophy, derived from Greek trópaion, is a part of a killed animal taken while hunting as a memento, such as horns, skin, head, skull or teeth. Originally a trophy was an evidence of victory, an object taken from the enemy and kept in a cultic place. In Finnish, the word 'trophy' (trofee) is nowadays mainly associated with hunting. In my work Bypass Surgery, I use a collection of trophies, bought from the estate of a deceased hunter. I have covered these trophies, already as such masculine-clichéd fetishes, by red-dyed natural latex, popular with the rubber fetishists.
As Roger-Pol Droit has noted, rubber is accompanied by peculiar pliability, by a sense that a surface covered with rubber turns into a second skin, a rubber shell. Rubber does not protect against the cold or the heat; the sweat, shut inside rubber, condenses to standing dampness, which duplicates the effects of the cold or the heat coming from outside, thus causing permanent moisture within. A person who thought to be protected by rubber realizes that she/he is kept as a prisoner, pale and devoid of oxygen, and little by little the rubber surface turns into a sarcophagus, which gnaws at the bone, nearly decomposes it, leaves it to soak, swell and go white. It is a matter of fate: that which gives protection also bars in, the protective cover turns into something deadly suffocating, and, finally, it solidifies and is petrified into a mummifying sepulcher.
(c)Timo Heino