Atopic bodies is a long term performance project by ATOPOS cvc, exploring the uncanny, eccentric and unclassified character of the human body in contemporary visual culture. Through collaborations between designers and artists from different backgrounds, new and radical Characters are being created by mixing visual and fashion codes. Atopic Bodies treats the body as an eternal atopos and appearance as a sociocultural construction.

The Anthropologist Ted Polhemus notes that “we are our bodies and yet our bodies’ abstract constructions of our culture are always and inevitably atopos to ourselves”. He argues that there is “no such thing as natural beauty; what is deemed to be attractive and desirable in one culture or era may be deemed hideous and repulsive in another”.

The project forms part of the research on the Character design in fashion and art related to the NOT A TOY, Fashioning Radical Characters book and the ARRRGH! Monsters in Fashion exhibition.