INSIDE ANIMAL KINGDOM
Body Worlds goes under the skin
Meander by the Montreal Science Centre and you will see a side of wildlife you’ve never seen before: the inside.
Since April, the centre in the Old Port has been home to the latest instalment of the now-infamous Body Worlds exhibits. Dubbed Animal Inside Out, it features 50 specimens of animals from the seas, the skies and land both near and far. Like a zoo, it’s a fascinating look at the creatures with whom we share this planet. Unlike a zoo, all the attractions are not only dead, but dissected and reassembled in often striking ways.
Like the exhibits in the original Body Worlds, which came to the Montreal Science Centre in 2007, each exhibit has gone through an extensive and complicated process called plastination. In short, the bodies are dehydrated, and the water in the cells is replaced by polymers such as silicone before the cadavers are dunked in an acidic bath. The result is perfectly preserved examples of the systems that keep us alive and moving — the capillaries in the skin of a horse’s head, the complex musculature of an adult bull or the sinewy nerves of a human arm.
In the original, there was a sublime message: stripped of skin, underneath any differences, humanity is all the same. Animal Inside Out takes it a step further: with several human specimens mixed in among the squids and cats and bulls, it becomes apparent that — human pretensions of superiority aside — we are all just meat and bone. Every animal, up and down the food chain, is made of similar stuff.
“Our human exhibition is very much dedicated to health education and that is not so much with animals, because the animal kingdom is so rich in diversity, it’s very hard to decide where to start and stop,” said Body Worlds creative and conceptual designer Angelina Whalley. “With animals, it was more my goal to make people understand that all animals share in the same needs to survive.”
The exhibit’s primary purpose is to be educational; since its opening, numerous classes of schoolchildren have come through. While the subject matter might seem gruesome, Montreal Science Centre public-relations manager Jimmy Laforge said that in his experience the little ones have been more terrified by the T. Rex in dinosaur exhibitions than anything in Animal Inside Out.
“It’s for everybody, but the kids are amazed by nature and the adults see the esthetics of it. It’s really for the entire family,” he said. “It’s the best class in biology in Montreal.”
Though there are informative placards placed with each specimen, the striking nature of Body Worlds has a visceral effect the first time through that is more along the lines of how you’d react to an art display than a scientific lecture. For instance, a camel has been split into three parts at the neck, with each section frozen in a different pose, giving a troika of views into its inner workings while also suggesting the graceful motions the animal was capable of; it presents both an anatomical lesson and a more philosophical lesson on the fragility and magic of life.
The artistry is a happy accident made possible by the plastination process, and is also what made Body Worlds a phenomenon. It allows the work to exist on the fine ledge dividing science and art.
“We are anatomists and our main interest is really the anatomy, but we understood early on that, particularly if you want to address lay people, the specimen would need to have additional qualities than just the science of it,” said Whalley.
“Some people might have never seen a corpse, so they might feel rude: ‘Dead animals on display? That’s nothing for my kids.’ The specimen must be appealing; they must be able to wow our audience.”
That wow factor has definitely been achieved in Animal Inside Out. If anything, it’s easier to appreciate the exhibit due to the focus being moved away from Homo sapiens — the original Body Worlds garnered criticism and protest over the display of deceased humans, despite all cadavers being used with the permission of the dead and their families. Similarly, all creatures used in Animal Inside Out died of natural causes, their bodies donated for an educational purpose.
“It was important to us that no animal on display was killed or harmed for the purpose of this exposition,” said Whalley. “We mostly received these animals from zoos or animal parks, and a few from private people.”
While this exhibit may not inspire the same outrage as the original, perhaps it should. After all, in this age of climate-change denial, a message about the fragility of life can be controversial. If a discussion about saving the planet’s collective skin can be inspired by animals who have none, then they didn’t die in vain.