The presentation explores whiteness as an unstable surface — a tectonic layer of the skin, a Skin Territory, where beauty, fear and  metamorphosis intersect. Stripping away the idea of white as purity,  we see it as a volatile medium: seductive, dangerous, luminous,  hollow, divine and bestial.

From the kaolin-coated faces of Agbogho Mmuo masks in Nigeria to the pale trickery of Alemannic Fastnacht figures, the white mask carries intrinsic tension. Each culture shapes whiteness to its own paradox: the sacred always contains the hidden, the ideal and the grotesque lie just a blink apart.

Marlene Herberth navigates archives, myths and ruptures with an anthropologist’s method, crafting sensorial worlds where microhistories glitch against hyperreal narratives.

In recent cultural studies, the skin is seen as the body’s fundamental  organ, formed before any other sensory system. Didier Anzieu’s  concept of the “Skin Ego” describes the skin as both barrier and  organizer of psychic experience. As a frontier organ, the skin records and archives sensory history, becoming a visible map of memories, scars and traces.

As an extension of the skin, clothing operates as a “second skin” that  forms, together with the Skin Ego, a transitional and regulatory  interface in which protection, memory, shame, theological symbolism and cultural inscription converge, continuously structuring and renegotiating human identity within contemporary socio-cultural dynamics.

Working within an interdisciplinary field, Marian Pălie (PhD) connects multiple areas of interest, such as non-figurative collage, applied and theorized meta-styling, and curatorial practice. Themes such as reform, the exploration of the body and the contrast and cohabitation between the visible and the invisible are often found in his works and writings.

This presentation unfolds a techno-poetic reading of the landscape, drawn from artistic gestures that drift toward science and scientific experiments that drift toward art. The landscape overlaps with humanity as a shared surface — sometimes exceeding it by microns, other times by light-years.

‘I imagine the landscape as a sensitive membrane, a living skin responding to touch, erosion, memory, and technology. A layered surface that keeps offering new ways of being read: geological, emotional, biological, cultural.’

Seen this way, the landscape is not a backdrop but a living organism in
slow transformation — a zone where matter, time, and human  presence translate one another.

Ovidiu Daneș is an independent curator and the president of the  DALA Foundation.

This presentation considers the skin as an active biological surface, a responsive territory where identity forms at the molecular level. ‘We’ll explore how genetics, diet and lifestyle shape this delicate ecosystem, subtly generating our personal olfactory trace through the compounds produced by skin bacteria’.

The guest speaker’s perspective centers on the skin as a sensory interface where chemical signals are received through the vomeronasal system and transmitted directly to the amygdala, the  brain’s centre of emotional processing.

Florin Sebastian Piscociu is a psychologist and Executive Director of the MindLifeline International Association. With training in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, he coordinates psychological and neuropsychological support programs, including “Therapy for
Ukraine,” and works with certified therapists to provide culturally
adapted, evidence-based, free interventions.