The story is amazing, but it’s based on a slightly more believable true story. The man who sold his skin, Tunisian feature film in competition for the Oscar for best foreign film (the ceremony will take place on April 26) – the first participation of this country – tells how a Syrian sacrificed his back to a contemporary artist against the promise of a better life in Europe. However, a barely less scabrous transaction, in the Switzerland of the 2000s, is at the origin of the film by director Kaouther Ben Hania.
It all started in 2006, in Zurich, in the very chic gallery of Pury & Luxembourg, which exhibited Wim Delvoye, a wacky Flemish artist, perhaps the last of the surrealists. After having designed a shit machine – the replica of the digestive process producing excrement -, transformed into stained glass photographs of fellatio and tattooed live pigs, the provocateur wants to go further. At his gallery, he asks permission to install a tattoo station and find a man ready to give him his back. “My goal was to upset the hierarchy of values, he said today on the phone, since in Papua New Guinea, a tattooed person is respected. In prison, he commands esteem. But, in art, the tattoo is worthless. ”
Skinned then tanned
One of the gallery’s employees, Stéphanie Schleiffer, introduced the artist to her then boyfriend, Tim Steiner. This former gas station attendant turned musician, who already wears several tattoos, is the perfect guinea pig for this artistic experience. “A very good choice, a handsome boy, an exhibitionist at will”, opines Wim Delvoye, who produces a work called Tim, in homage to its support, representing a praying Virgin surmounted by a Mexican skull. Between Wim and Tim, a contract specifies the methods of showing the back, during public exhibitions.
This is how Kaouther Ben Hania discovered the tattooed man in 2012, during an exhibition by Wim Delvoye at the Louvre. “The image remained engraved in my head, but I had to find the story that goes with it”, confides the filmmaker who, in her films, strives to decipher the mechanics of power, whether it is police, religious or, in this case, artistic. In reality, however, the adventure is far from over.
In 2008, the Swiss gallery found a buyer, Rik Reinking, a thirty-something collector based in Hamburg. Two law firms are mandated to formalize the contractual framework of the transaction, which amounts to 150,000 euros. Is “The same price as a stuffed pig”, specifies Wim Delvoye. Under the terms of the contract, Tim agrees that, after his death, the skin on his back will be skinned and then tanned for the collector to collect.
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