Fluxus bodies: changing shape, changing perspective
My body is my business card
It arrives before I do; it speaks before I even open my mouth. It’s different—it moves according to its own unique geometry, and sometimes it gets stuck. But I assure you, it works just fine. It’s not the standard body you see on magazine covers, in medical textbooks, or in architects’ default plans. And yet, it’s the body I have—the one that carries me each day through calls, ideas, people, passions, events, texts, stairs, and silences. A body that changes—and changes me. A fluxus body, in constant motion. Growing up, I realized it’s not my body that needs to be “fixed” to fit into the world. It’s the world that needs to expand to make space for all bodies—even the non-conforming, the different, the powerful, the fast-paced. Bodies like mine, that don’t fit the outline of a mannequin and show you that other forms of beauty, presence, and capability exist. My body is my business card. It arrives before I do; it speaks before I even open my mouth. It’s different—it moves in its own way, and sometimes it gets stuck. But I assure you, it works just fine.
The silent revolution of transformations
The body is never the same. Not even for a day. It changes skin, scars, posture, desires. It changes when it grows, when it bleeds, when it gets sick or heals. It changes when it loves, when it exposes itself, when it is looked at. It is a work in progress, not a finished object. Just like in the Fluxus art movement, which in the 1960s rejected fixed and celebrated forms of official art to embrace process, gesture, impermanence, our bodies too are daily performative acts, refusing stillness. They are experiences more than aesthetics. Actions more than forms. Every bodily change is a rewriting, a new language that unsettles us only if we’re used to reading a single alphabet. So who decides which transformation is “normal”? Who decided that the ideal body must never waver, slow down, change? Pregnancy, for example, is often described as a hymn to life, but is rarely actually supported as a condition. Spaces, time, work: everything keeps asking you to be the same as before. As if change were a mistake to be corrected. As if the body should always go back, never move forward. The same goes for motor disability. Which is not a parenthesis, but a condition many people experience—permanently or temporarily. And yet, accessible spaces are still the exception, not the rule. As if the world were designed only for efficient, standardized bodies, forgetting that all of us, sooner or later, become non-conforming to something.
Accessibility as culture, not as an exception
Physical and sensory accessibility is not a concession. It is a political choice. It means knowing that any body can, at any moment, need something different: a slower pace, support, a clearer interface, a place without barriers. It means stopping designing for minorities and starting to design with plurality. When a space is designed with only the "optimal" body in mind, millions of real people are excluded. Tired bodies, healing bodies, changing bodies. And this is exactly where real cultural change happens: not in the technical gesture, but in the gaze.
From data to face
Medicine often forgets that bodies are not just objects of care, but subjects of experiences. The data used in clinical tests are still skewed towards a certain type of body: male, young, white, able-bodied. Everything that deviates from that model is diagnosed late, poorly listened to, and worse treated. Yet inclusion in data is not a matter of “diversity”: it is a matter of clinical effectiveness. Of justice. Of survival. You cannot do good medicine if you ignore half the world. You cannot innovate if your starting point is already exclusive.
Bodies as questions
The body is a living question. A continuous challenge to our models. It is the place where politics, culture, biology, desire intertwine. It is our way of being in the world, and when it changes, it asks us to change with it. To those who design, care, communicate, I ask: can we stop searching for the ideal body and start building systems for all possible bodies? Mine, for example, is anything but ideal. But it keeps the rhythm. It knows how to move mountains when needed. And when it stumbles, it gets up with more creativity than before. I don’t ask to be corrected. I ask the world to learn to move with me, not against me.
Because if we really want to talk about innovation, then let’s start with bodies. Imperfect, tired, quirky ones. Bodies like mine. Like yours. Like ours.