NaturalSynthetics

BODY WORLDS Wrocław — Facebook-Ad image-grid, May 2026. HIGH NOTE EVENTS sp. z o.o. / Institut für Plastination Heidelberg. Captured for analytical use under §51 UrhG / art. 29 PL Ustawa o prawie autorskim.

The 1992 Robert Zemeckis film Death Becomes Her gave Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn a magic potion that preserved their bodies forever while their flesh kept on dying underneath. The gag was that you could keep the form while subtracting the substrate. A Facebook ad on a Wrocław feed in May 2026 advertises something close. The exhibition is called Body Worlds, the current edition is The Cycle of Life, the venue is IASE on Wystawowa 1, the run has just been extended to the 30th of June. Four photos: a chess player, a cowboy figure with a hat, a school group looking into a vitrine, a posed body with parents and children standing in front.

The text of the ad reads, in Polish, autentyczne eksponaty — ciał i narządów przekazanych przez dobrowolnych dawców do Instytutu Plastynacji w Heidelbergu 🙏 — authentic specimens, bodies and organs donated by voluntary donors to the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg, with a prayer-emoji. This is a translation that is not a translation. The German Demokratisierung der Anatomie (the democratisation of anatomy — Hagens' own slogan since the 1990s) does not appear; the Polish phrase is prezentacja naukowa (scientific presentation). The Lutheran-Reformation history that gave the German slogan its weight is unavailable here as a resonance-chamber, so the slogan is quietly replaced by its secular-scientific cognate. Heidelberg, however, makes the trip intact. Its name in the Polish feed is doing two jobs at once: it anchors the donor-consent frame, and it answers a question the ad never asks aloud — where else, then, do these bodies come from.

BODY WORLDS Wrocław — Facebook-Ad text, May 2026. Heidelberg-Attribution + Prayer-Emoji quoted analytically above. §51 UrhG / art. 29 PL.

Donor consent is the moral hinge of the entire operation. The Heidelberg programme has nearly twenty thousand registered donors, mostly German, who have signed away their bodies during their lifetimes. In the slogan's logic, this is enough to make everything that follows acceptable. It is also a specific anthropological position dressed as a universal one. The body owned sufficiently to be disposed of after death is the body C. B. Macpherson called possessive-individualist — a self related to itself the way an owner is related to a property. Other anthropologies have other answers. The body held in trust because it was given. The body that belongs to the relational fabric of the living, who carry obligations to it that cannot be signed away in advance. The body partly withdrawn from disposal because death generates a dignity that survives the person.

The consent-anchor presents one position as natural and makes the others unsayable without an argument. The Menschenbild — the conception of the human person an institution operates with, even when it doesn't say so — is here without being named.

The ad lands very quietly in Poland. The resonance-chamber that in Germany would have spoken at length about this — the Lutheran ethics commissions, the dignity-jurists, the medical-ethicists with institutional standing — is configured differently here. The Polish episcopate has issued no position. The political parties across the spectrum have not raised the question. The academic bioethics chairs, where they exist, have produced isolated individual interventions rather than a consolidated voice. This is not a verdict on Polish capacity for critical reflection. It is a structural fact about institutional configurations: a hegemonial-majority church does not produce dignity-statements the way a minority church under public Stellungnahmepflicht (statement-duty) does; a parliamentary system without an established bioethics-rapporteur does not generate the same case-law pressure that a federal system with three legal tracks generates. The ad arrives without the apparatus that, in another configuration, would have surrounded it with thirty years of argument.

Back to the picture. The plastinates are posed — chess, cowboy, dancer-attendant, family-group exhibit. The cycle of life of the title is performed through these poses, and what the poses share is what they exclude. Not one of the four figures is shown frail. There is no Pflege-Bedürftigkeit (the state of needing care), no terminal weakness, no body that has been visibly given up to dying. The anatomist Andreas Winkelmann at the Charité pointed out two decades ago that classical anatomy required a geschützter Raum (protected space) — closed, mediated, conducted under conditions that preserved the precarious tissue between the donor and those who would learn from the donated body. The exhibition removes the protection and keeps the body, and what it shows in compensation is a body shaped to be looked at by anyone, by which it has had to become a body without the iconography of actual dying. Meryl Streep's character in 1992 would recognise the formula.

Form preserved, substrate quietly removed, the question of what is left declared irrelevant.

Hagens describes himself as an Erlebnisanatom — an experience-anatomist, coined from Erlebnisgesellschaft, the sociological diagnosis of a German late-modern experience-society. He has said that in such a society he must communicate emotionally. The muss does a lot of work in that sentence. A historically specific situation — one country, one decade, one sociological diagnosis — has been quietly refitted as a professional necessity. Other anatomists go on teaching in lecture halls without posing dead chess players. Other communicators of medical knowledge goon running textbooks and open-access platforms and dissection courses.

The muss is a commercial decision to operate in an emotional register, dressed up as a sociological law.

The legal move is the most consequential. Hagens has explained that plastinates are Strukturelemente des menschlichen Körpers ohne Leichenqualität — structural elements of the human body without corpse-character. The phrase does not describe a property of plastinates; it relocates them out of the legal regime that protects corpses. If the plastinate is not a corpse, the burial law does not apply, the post-mortem-dignity provisions of the criminal code do not apply, and the carve-outs the jurist Brigitte Tag has spent decades developing — a conditional toleration of plastination only where consent, post-mortem dignity, and public sentiment are jointly preserved — become unnecessary. An ontology has been declared in juridical clothing. The Polish ad has no need to repeat the move because the Polish legal field around plastination is empty in any case. An industrial process with production sites in three countries does not require a great deal of explanation when there is nobody specifically tasked with asking.

The ad's text promises a full arc: Od pierwszych komórek, poprzez rozwój płodu, dojrzewanie, aż po zmiany ze starzeniem się organizmu — from the first cells, through fetal development, maturation, to the changes of an aging organism. The four photographs do not. The cycle of life made visible in the image-grid is the commercially serviceable middle: an athletic figure in a cowboy hat, an athletic figure at a chess board, schoolchildren peering into a glass case, a posed figure with parents and small children. The first cells and the foetus are in the prose, absent from the picture. The aging organism is in the prose; the figures do not show it. The Cycle of Life is, in the ad, the part of the cycle that is comfortable to look at on a phone screen between other Facebook posts.

None of this is unknown. A dense German-language academic literature on Body Worlds goes back to the late 1990s. Stefan Hirschauer's 2002 essay on plastination called the plastinates Scheinlebendige — the seemingly-alive — and traced the operations of denial they perform. The 2001 edited volume Schöne neue Körperwelten, with Brigitte Tag among its editors, contains a chapter titled Von der herrenlosen Sache zum kommerziellen Objekt — from the ownerless thing to the commercial object — that did the value-form analysis these ads still require. The 2017 paper Kapitalistisch verwertbare Körper in Soziale Passagen updated it. The Duisburg Institute for Linguistic and Social Research has been mapping the discourse for decades. The analysis is in print, in German. What is missing in Poland is not the analysis. It is the political and organisational uptake that would carry it across.

The same Menschenbild travels from Heidelberg to Wrocław unchanged. A self that owns the body sufficiently to dispose of it. A body posed in agency-vocabulary, with frailty edited out. A juridical category designed to release the body from the protective regime that would otherwise surround it. A pedagogical muss that converts a marketing decision into a sociological law. These are not four separate operations. They are one operation seen from four angles, and they describe one kind of person: optimised, agentic, post-mortally disposable, available for educational entertainment under conditions that no longer require asking very much. The German configuration has had thirty years to argue with the package and has produced jurists, sermons, parliamentary questions, court decisions, a small library of academic books. The Polish configuration is meeting the same package now, in the form of a Facebook ad with a prayer-emoji and a link to a ticket vendor. The package itself is identical.

The chess player will be in IASE on Wystawowa 1 until the 30th of June. Visitors will see what the image already shows: a body posed for the encounter, with no day in it that looks like the last day of a body. Streep's character drank the potion for what she thought would be eternal youth. The donor signed for what they understood as anatomy education. The visitor buys a ticket. What is the body walking into the exhibition room agreeing to?

Around the corner from the John Paul II mural on the same convent wall – discussed in an earlier post – someone has pasted a different kind of holy figure: naked, sitting on a low ledge, headphones on, eyes on her phone, a Lidl bag of May asparagus beside her.

It is not painted into the wall. It is a paste-up – paper cut to shape, glued onto the plaster, removable in minutes. The artist is Krzysztof Zbik Rubach, known locally as Vanzbik, a Wroclaw muralist whose work consists almost entirely of female nudes in public space. He has been doing this for years. Some of his pieces survive on tolerated walls; others, on more exposed spots like the bridge near Szczytnicki Park, have been destroyed without explanation. This one, for now, is intact.

The wall belongs to the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the nuns who agreed in 2022 to let football fans paint a five-by-twenty-five-meter John Paul II onto their building. That mural faces the entrance to Ostrow Tumski, Wroclaw's cathedral island; pilgrims and tourists pass it on the way to the dom. The Lidl Madonna faces the other direction – Wyszynskiego street, a tram and bus stop, the daily flow of commuters waiting in May 2026 weather. Same wall, two different audiences, two different rules about what counts as a picture.

The first thing the Lidl Madonna does is recognizable from any catalogue of Marian iconography. The seated posture, slightly turned, head lowered toward something held in both hands – this is the Madonna of Humility, the Madonna with Child, the Mater Dolorosa contemplating what she cannot let go of. Every traditional attribute has a substitute in the picture: a halo becomes over-ear headphones, the mantle becomes bare skin, the lilies and pomegranates of Marian symbolism become leeks, asparagus, and chard in a discount-store bag, the gold ground becomes a graffitied convent wall. There is no Christ child; there is a phone. The image does not announce any of this. It just builds a Madonna out of present-tense materials and lets you decide whether to see it.

But the iconographic operation is the method, not the message. What the picture actually says, it says along two lines: about the body it shows, and about the kind of attention the figure is paying to her phone.

The body first. This is a lived-in body. Mid-thirties, maybe early forties. Soft belly with the fold a normal torso makes when seated. Asymmetrical breasts of average size. Visible knuckles, real veins. Faint nasolabial lines, lips at their natural volume. Cropped hair under the headphones. Two tattoos – geometric across the shoulder, figurative on the ankle. No filtered glow, no flat midsection, no plumped cheekbones, no hyper-feminized posture. She is not arranged for the viewer. She is not even looking at the viewer. She is in herself, with her things, on her way home.

In 2026, that is a position. The visible female body in mainstream image production – advertising, platforms, fashion, increasingly daily life in big European cities – has been quietly rebuilt over the past five years. GLP-1 weight-loss drugs in the Ozempic family have moved from diabetes medicine to mass thinness therapy; lip filler, cheek volume, jaw contouring, the so-called Instagram face have settled into normal adult life; cosmetic surgery is a routine procurement decision in many milieus, with Poland both a destination for Western medical tourism and a growing domestic market. The threshold for an acceptable female body has shifted, and the shift is pharmacological and surgical, not aspirational. Not having done any of it is now a marked position. A body that has not been optimized has become a thing you have to choose to show.

Zbik shows it. The Madonna form gives that choice its weight. Traditional Madonnas are idealized: young, smooth, symmetrical, often barely anatomical – they were the long original of the optimized female body, centuries before Botox. The Lidl Madonna borrows their seated dignity and fills it with the opposite of their idealization. The sacred frame remains; the body inside the frame is unedited. It is a quiet refusal of the optimization economy, made without polemic, made by showing what an unaltered body looks like when you give it the same compositional respect you would give a saint.

Now the second line: what she is doing with her phone. She is in the pose of devotion. Head down, hands cupped around an object held in front of her body, the world tuned out by the headphones. This is what Marian contemplation looks like. The form has survived what used to fill it. What it now contains is not Christ but the open application on a screen – message, image, feed, song. The picture does not tell you whether that is tragic or natural. It just shows you that the form of devout absorption is still working, with a new center of gravity.

A hundred years ago Walter Benjamin wrote a short fragment arguing that capitalism is itself a religion – not because it replaces religion but because it is structured as cult: permanent, without a day off, producing debt and not redemption, with no outside. He never finished the argument. The Lidl Madonna lets you see what he might have meant. Devotion did not disappear when belief did. It found a new object that fits the old hand position perfectly. The phone is the right size, the right weight, the right shape to be held the way a child was held.

That is also why the Lidl bag matters specifically. Not Biedronka – the Polish discount chain locals nickname Biedra, from biedota, a word for the destitute, which gives the brand an undertone of being where you shop when you cannot do better. Not Epi, the Wroclaw premium grocer where the city's professional class buys imported salmon and small-batch wine. Lidl – the middle, German efficiency, weekly fresh aisle, ordinary May. The choice rules out two readings the picture refuses: it is not a lament about poverty, and it is not satire of aspiration. It is the regular consuming life of regular consumers, depicted with the same care a Renaissance painter would give to a Virgin with lilies.

Around the corner the John Paul II mural is doing different work. It is painted into the wall, not pasted on. It is twenty-five meters long, crowdfunded by the football ultras, signed collectively (kibice wroclawskiego Slaska), addressed to a collective (Poles, Catholics, the faithful, the patriots). It exists to say what we are. It fought a three-and-a-half-year battle with the city's heritage authority and won. The Lidl Madonna is not arguing with it. The two pictures are not in a debate. They live on the same wall because the wall has two sides and the two sides have different rules. The pilgrim side gets a question about identity; the tram-stop side gets a question about how a person lives now.

That second question is the one the Lidl Madonna actually asks. Not what we believe, not whom we belong to, not what we are willing to defend – but what we do with our bodies under pharmaceutical pressure, and what we do with our attention under platform pressure, and whether the old forms of holding something in your hands and looking down at it for a long time still work when the something is a phone and the body is unedited.

The picture is paste-up. It can be torn off any morning. Other Zbik works at less protected spots already have been. The convent wall, the nuns' tolerance, the heavy foot traffic of a tram stop – these are the accidents of survival that let this image exist at all. The argument the picture makes can only be made in a form light enough to be removable. That is not the picture's weakness. It is its condition.

You can walk past it on the way to the cathedral and never see it. You can wait for your tram and stare at it for ten minutes without registering what it is doing. Either is fine. The Madonna is patient. She is looking at her phone.

On April 19th, Warsaw fills with yellow paper daffodils. The Zonkile campaign – named for the flower worn by bystanders who watched the ghetto burn – has become the city's annual act of witness to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This year, the daffodils were accompanied by a petition. It asked city authorities to stop flying the Israeli flag at the anniversary ceremonies.

The petition, signed by philosopher Adam Lipszyc and activist Maria Swietlik, argues that the fighters of 1943 came primarily from communist and socialist movements – and that the Israeli flag, symbol of a state born five years after the uprising, does not belong among the markers of their memory. Kamil Kijek, a historian of Polish Jewish life at the University of Wroclaw whose 2026 monograph examines these very organizations, has documented the factual problems with this picture: three of the five organizations named in the petition – Ha-Szomer Ha-Cair, Dror, Poalej-Syjon Left – were Zionist organizations; the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, a Revisionist Zionist force that fought in the uprising and flew a blue-and-white Star of David flag at Muranowski Square, goes unmentioned.

But historical inaccuracy alone does not explain rhetorical power. The petition circulates, feels convincing to many, and has generated a serious public debate. That requires something more than factual error. It requires myth.

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Myth, in Roland Barthes's sense, is not a falsehood. It is a historically contingent meaning that has been made to appear natural – self-evident, beyond question, simply the way things are. The myth does not announce itself. It presents its conclusions as descriptions.

The petition operates through three such myths.

The flag without a past. The blue-and-white flag with a Star of David is read by the petition exclusively as a symbol of the contemporary Israeli state and its military conduct in Gaza. This reading flattens the sign's history. The flag – in various forms – was a Zionist organizational symbol from the 1890s onwards, decades before Israeli statehood. It flew at Muranowski Square not as a national flag imported from outside but as an expression of identities that grew inside Polish Jewish life. The mythological operation is precise: it strips the sign of its temporal depth and presents one layer of its meaning – the contemporary state – as the natural, total meaning. A historical object is made to stand only for the present.

The neutral guardian. The petition asks Warsaw's authorities to act as “neutral guardians” of the uprising's memory – to prevent it from being “assigned to one state or contemporary political narrative.” The neutrality claim does real mythological work. It frames the removal of the Israeli flag as a passive, administrative act: the city simply refrains from intervening. In reality, the removal of a symbol is an intervention – it changes what is visible in a commemorative space. Calling this neutrality is the myth: it presents a political choice as the absence of one.

The constituted we. The petition's most charged phrase is nasze dziedzictwo – “our heritage.” The “we” is never defined. It is constituted by the petition's logic: those who identify with the fighters' anti-fascist struggle, minus those who can be associated with the contemporary Israeli state. “Our heritage” sounds like a simple possessive. It is actually a boundary-drawing operation – performed quietly, in plain sight.

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These three myths do not emerge from nowhere. They connect to a pattern in Polish public memory that predates this petition and will outlast it.

Jewish history in Poland – a presence stretching across a thousand years – is processed, in the mainstream, almost entirely through the lens of a single decade: the Holocaust. The destruction was enormous and deserves its place in memory. But the exclusive focus produces a distortion: it makes Jewish life in Poland legible primarily through its ending. What came before – the cultural complexity, the political debates, the Zionist movements, the deep connections to Palestine – recedes into background noise.

The petition fits within this distortion. It needs the ghetto fighters as symbols of universal anti-fascist resistance. To use them that way, it has to subtract their particular identities – the Zionism, the HeHalutz orientation toward Palestine, the Revisionist underground with its own flag and its own dead. The symbol is adopted; the identity of the symbol-bearers is set aside.

This is not a small editorial decision. The fighters of 1943 were people with specific beliefs about Jewish life, Jewish statehood, and where Jewish existence might have a future. Honoring them as symbols while erasing those beliefs is not a neutral act of memory. It is myth-making – the process by which historically specific, contested, complex human beings are transformed into usable abstractions.

The yellow daffodil asks Warsaw to remember. The question the petition raises – inadvertently – is: remember whom, exactly, and on whose terms.