In recent years, men’s own bodies have become an issue – a medium for self-expression and an object that could be improved or optimized. The city of Berlin now seems to me to be a stage par excellence for self-expression and in this respect I wonder how it is used by men for this purpose.
I see the body as a medium and as material in the broadest sense, as a thing that is loaded with desires and hopes.
In 2006, the Berlin cultural scientist Hartmut Böhme invited us with his large-scale study Fetishism and Culture to understand all the things to which we attribute energies, forces, or power as fetishes. We modern humans had learned that we should not attribute agency or power to objects. Such thinking was therefore considered superstitious and pre-modern. However, the magical, mythical, cultic or religious practices of the pre-modern era merely channeled energies and needs that are not alien to us “modern” people either. And that is why, according to Böhme, we have created new practices for these energies and needs – esotericism and superstition, star cults and commodity fetishism, for example.
The body cult of the recent past also belongs in this category, as the body has become the bearer of many hopes and desires as a wearable fitness badge and the core of fashionable self-presentation. And this applies not only to the presentation on social media channels, but also to the urban space. I therefore invite you to look for “charged” male bodies in Berlin.
Theo Steiner
