Laia Abril: Thinspiration
After the shock comes the anger. It is disturbing when you see in real-time how lively human bodies dissolve into nothingness.
Laia Abril collected internet pictures of women who commemorate anorexia and photograph themselves doing it. She also collected instructions on how to get extra skinny, and posts in internet forums which demonstrate and document with what “lightness” and how baseless the young (most of the time) women addict themselves to this cult of losing weight. That in principle – in extreme cases – their vita is slanted towards destroying knowingly their bodies.
Thinspiration however is not a book aiming at shocking. The arrangement is elaborate and excellently realized. The pop up sites display “more”, and so you feel like diving into a world – exposing yourself to it – whose abyss you had not known before and did not want to know.