Abstract
The touring exhibition of Von Hagens attracted more than 25 million visitors around the world, raising controversies and questioning the status of his work. In Paris, the current exhibition "Our body" attracts a massive afflux of onlookers. Is Von Hagens' work a piece of art? Von Hagens invented in 1974 the technique of plastination, after his medical studies. Plastination is a process that consists of replacing the fat and the water naturally present in the body by silicone rubber in a vacuum-tight space. The greatest achievement of this technique is that a corpse can be preserved forever, remaining very supple and odourless. If the technique seems simple, but its application is very time-consuming, each body requiring more than a thousand hours of work.
