The Naked Soul
 

Video Installation

Video Essay on the Nude Freedom Activist

Old Canton Cemetery, Edinburgh, Scotland 2013

In collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and University of Stirling

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The repression of nakedness reveals the flickering trace of a body shaped through fear and desire. Social life is written in sedimented layers, each fragment of the past resurfacing in the present. Since the advent of modernity, nudity has unleashed tensions between justice, puritan façades, and the ghosts of early social groups.
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In Greek myth, Zeus decreed that souls must be judged naked, for clothing concealed sins and secrets. Stripped of garments, the skin itself became an archive: scarred, wrinkled, and luminous with memory. Justice, then, required exposure.
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Centuries later, the Enlightenment imagined citizens equally stripped before the law, yet puritan remnants still weigh upon the body. Post-industrial society pushes this paradox further: while self-care and hedonism dominate the surface of the skin, public nudity remains forbidden.
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In the 21st century, Stephen Gough—known as the “naked rambler”—embodied this contradiction. For walking unclothed across Britain, he was repeatedly imprisoned, even entering court and visiting his mother naked. His case forces liberalism to confront its own fissures: how can a man lose his freedom in the very society that claims to guarantee it?
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This tension is not new. Scotland once buried the memory of the Picts, warriors who fought the Romans naked and tattooed, later demonized as barbarous. Twice erased—first by empire, then by liberal modernity—their myth lingers as an unassimilated force of freedom.
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The act of walking naked is less about motive than consequence. Each step reopens history, staging a theatre of the present where a naked soul claims autonomy over his body, while society criminalises this act of freedom. Behind the scene, puritan logic and rational subjectivity continue to press against the return of a primitive, sovereign force: the body made visible, unmasked, and free.