Carlos Trosman is an explorer of the bodily continent, of the sensitive geography of its different territories, and of its play at the heart of the social and cultural fabric. But he never forgets that although the individual is immersed in a culture and a social condition, it is never the passive consequence, but what he does with the influences that weigh on him. It admirably shows the extent to which the body today is a social analyzer, a revealer of social tensions or simply of differences. Carlos Trosman defines himself as a "corporalist". And indeed I know Carlos Trosman as a therapist who takes the body as a mediation, as an acupuncturist, as a writer, as a researcher, I also know him as a passionate and exciting man, a tireless traveler, a man of all curiosities and who takes the questions that are posed to him to the extreme. The anecdote takes under his pen the value of demonstration and accesses theoretical dignity thanks to the analyses that it justifies. "The deepest thing is the skin," said Paul Valéry. Here, the surface of social interactions becomes a scene observed with a magnifying glass to enlarge the most significant features.
Translated from French: Viviana Fruchtnicht
A calm and incisive explorer at the same time, Carlos Trosman is a kind of flâneur[1] straight out of a text by Walter Benjamin, attentive to the signs that concern bodily attitudes in the heart of the city or elsewhere, he walks through the streets contemplating the trembling of the world without anything escaping him. And from the attitude of a passer-by, or from his emotion on a plane taken in an area of turbulence, from the unexpected encounter of peasants with massive and naked bodies in the streets of Mexico – a day when they were demonstrating for their rights – he weaves a series of reflections that incite us to see bodies in a different way. He travels through the plurality of social and cultural worlds as an attentive and expressive observer. The Other is the detour that leads to the Self, just as the Self is the detour that leads to the Other. The other is not enclosed in a status of otherness, he is not assigned to his difference, but questioned about himself in order to understand himself better. Such is the path followed by Carlos to tell us about ourselves by talking about him, through the rebound of the attitude of an anonymous person in the crowd. Every moment of the body, every perception, every emotion, every movement at the moment of an interaction, Carlos Trosman points out, is an observatory that takes us beyond the body, to the heart of the social, the cultural and the political. The body is traversed by history, it materializes meanings, values, not only in its movements, but also, of course, in the gaze of the observer.