An ongoing interactive multimedia art project created by Tasha Diamant
At its most essential, the Human Body Project is about understanding vulnerability by sharing an experience of vulnerability. In this upcoming event on Friday, April 4, at 7 PM, at the Bowman Arts Centre in Lethbridge, I stand naked in a room. People are invited to come look at me/be with me and to observe conversational silence. If participants feel a need to mediate their emotions in some way, there are “self-expression stations” where they can make art, write or speak into a microphone.
This year I am 46 years old; I had a baby last year; I have not had plastic surgery. If there is some safety in glamour, well, I am not remotely glamourous. Being naked in front of people is as difficult for me as it is for most people. But as a mother I feel an intense urgency to make people really get that we live in a vulnerable and interconnected world.
I feel impatient to see change, but am often confronted by the brick wall of comfort with the status quo. My belief is that the big shifts that are necessary won’t happen until enough of us viscerally understand our own and our collective vulnerability. My theory is something like this: allowing vulnerability leads to compassion and connection, which leads to caring about each other and ourselves and the earth. Enough of us do this and the norms change and everyone shifts—sort of like how Canada is a more tolerant country even though we aren’t very different from Americans; our norm is simply more tolerant and less violent and so we are more tolerant and less violent.
When I conceived this project in 2006 I wanted to do at least one annual event, partly as a chronicle of my sample human body and the changes that take place in it over the years. I am honouring that original intention although I feel a lot of ambivalence about showing up naked again this year. One reason for the ambivalence is that HBP seems to be part of a zeitgeist that includes a broader tolerance of imperfect nakedness (from Leonard Nimoy’s photographs to that Queer Eye guy’s new show to those annoying Dove ads) and I do wonder if an actual event continues to be necessary. Another reason is that I feel fat and old and don’t want anyone to look at me, which for me as a naked person is painful but works quite well for the purposes of an art project about expanding the comfort zone.
With this project, I hope to continue to provoke a serious consideration of vulnerability—our own, as humans in a body, and, by extension, the troubled planet’s.
Tasha Diamant is also a longtime painter with paintings in hundreds of corporate and private collections. She has been a journalist for national newsmagazines including Maclean’s and Australia’s Who Weekly. She has also been a yoga instructor and experiential workshop facilitator at the largest holistic health facilities in the US, Kripalu Center and the Omega Institute. She now teaches public speaking at Lethbridge College. Tasha lives in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, with her two daughters and her husband, David Howell.