CA7- BODY WORLD, AMSTERDAM.
For my seventh cultural activity I went to the exhibition ‘Body World & the cycle
of life’ in Rotterdam, this is a worldfamous exhibition about the human
body and all its secrets hidden
underneath the skin. Every human
body there tells a story, plays a
game or shows a life. You walk in to
learn about the development from
youth to elderly, which includes the
different parts in your body, such as
your muscles, nerves, brain, bones
and more.
Since I was a kid, I’ve always been
interested in the science of the human body, this has developed into the fact that
I want to become a doctor or something relating to the medical field. So when a
friend told me about this exhibition, an exhibition with real bodies revealing their
secrets, I was immediately enthusiastic.
Something like Body World, wasn’t invented and building a single day. The brains
behind this miraculous exhibition is: Gunther von Hagens, he was born in 1945
and after long years full of politics, social studies, universities of science and
even imprisonment, he discovered plastination, in 1975. Plastination was the
base of Body Worlds, it is a way of vacuum related techniques to get rid of the
blood underneath the skin and ‘change’ the body into a sort of plastic mass and
thus create a very tenable body. Working out this technique took many years,
and still today he is perfecting his technique. Still, by his techniques it is now
able to keep body so well preserved and showable.
Still he worked on perfecting his technique for so long that only in 1992 he found
an organization for plastination, who distributed plastinated body parts for
educational matters, but also to Body Worlds which was first opened in 1995 in
Japan. Since then the exhibition has had over 28 million views, being seen all
around Europe, North-America and Asia.
When I heard about this exhibition, and when I found out for a bit what it would
be about, I wondered how this would all be shown, I couldn’t think of the idea
that many people would give their bodies to plastination and that body world
would b